India’s increasingly network-centric weapons, from the BrahMos cruise missile to the proposed Sudarshan Chakra air defence shield, will remain vulnerable so long as the semiconductors inside them are imported, senior defence scientists said on Tuesday, calling for chips to be designed, manufactured and packaged end-to-end in the country.
Sudarshan Chakra, the multi-layer, multi-domain air defence system announced by the Prime Minister, would fuse data from satellite, sea, air and land-based sensors using artificial intelligence-enabled software, he added. “But we have realised that is not enough for future warfare, for long-duration warfare, to take care of saturation attacks. That is too late in the present situation,” Dr. That dependence carries a security risk, Dr.
“The government has said that 3 nanometre we will achieve sometime around 2030 to 35. “If you want to wait for 2030 to 35 to achieve it, you will miss the bus. Saraswat said, recalling how supplies of the 8086/8087 processors used in the first Prithvi missile were curtailed once the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme was announced, and dried up further under the Missile Technology Control Regime.
“What you saw in Operation Sindoor … is that we are today more or less equipped with complete network-centric capability,” Dr. Saraswat said. Drone swarms, he noted, now arrive “in hundreds and thousands”, and directed energy weapons were needed alongside ballistic missile defence. Pillai said, warning that controls on materials, devices and chip-making equipment were coming. The equipment needed to make a foundry, and not just the foundry itself, would also have to be produced in India, he said. “These devices, if they are compromised while they are being manufactured, then your weapon is compromised,” he said, citing Stuxnet, in which a flaw introduced during fabrication allowed a controller running centrifuges at an Iranian enrichment plant to be remotely overrun. Communication links, foreign cloud infrastructure and foreign GPS-based position, navigation and timing systems posed the same problem, he said: “If the cloud is sitting outside, the entire information going through my network-centric warfare system through the cloud, I am compromised.”
Pillai said India already accounted for 20% of the world’s chip design capability. Instead of 20%, let us take 50% of the design we should do for the world,” he said, adding that universities should also take up packaging and testing. The prescription from the panel was end-to-end domestic capability under the India Semiconductor Mission covering materials, design, manufacturing, equipment and human resources, including compound semiconductors such as gallium nitride and silicon carbide, which sit at the front end of radars and imaging systems. The waiting line for extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment needed for advanced nodes was already four to five years, Dr. Saraswat noted. Both he and Dr. Pillai called for research and development fabs in the IITs and other universities, on the model of Belgium’s Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre, warning that without them India would again have to import technology for the next generation, such as neuromorphic chips. Dr. “Why not go in a big way to develop the manpower?
