INDIA'S FIRST FAB!!!!!!!!!!!

FAB City in Hyderabad, says Maran

IT and Communications Minister Dayanidhi Maran said that the semiconductor fabrication facility, FAB City, would come up at Hyderabad with an upfront investment of about $3 billion.

Indicating that Karnataka and Tamil Nadu lost out to Andhra Pradesh in bagging the country's first chip-manufacturing facility, Maran told reporters here the proposed FAB City, to be located in 1,200 acres, would generate about 1.5 million jobs by 2015.

"The Andhra Pradesh government had come forward to provide subsidy, land, power, water and even accommodation in Hyderabad to key officials of the project's promoters, US-based SemIndia Inc and Advance Micro Devices (AMD)," Maran said.

The US-based SemIndia is a consortium of NRI entrepreneurs, technocrats and angel investors.

Top Karnataka officials, who were involved in negotiating with SemIndia and AMD to locate the FAB City at Nanjungud near Mysore, declined to confirm whether the project had slipped out of the state.

"We have not heard from the promoters yet. We are not in a position to comment unless they (promoters) inform us about their decision to locate the project in Karnataka or elsewhere," a top official of the state commerce and industry department told IANS.

SemIndia CEO Vinod Agarwal was also not available to comment since he was travelling.

Following its decision to set up a FAB facility in India in partnership with AMD, SemIndia officials made a reconnaissance trip in December to Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka for a suitable location for the multibillion dollar project, which will be the first of its kind in the subcontinent.

Of the $3-billion proposed investment, $1.5 billion will be debt, raised against capital equipment and the balance ($1.5 billion) will be invested by SemiIndia founders, partners like AMD, strategic customers, venture capitalists, state and central governments.

The proposed FAB facility will have a capacity to produce about 30,000 wafers a month. Each wafer will consist of 100-1,000 chips. It can also produce a range of wafer chips.

The FAB is projected to generate about 5,000 direct/indirect jobs in the next two-three years. FAB City, in turn, will create hundreds of thousands of jobs over a period of time when chip-design centres, processing and ancillary units are set up in clusters.

The market size of the semiconductor industry is about $250 billion annually and has been growing at around seven percent per annum over the years. (IANS)