Image For Representation.
NEW DELHI: On June 13, 2026, P. Raja Manickam stood before graduating engineers at Kumaraguru College of Technology in Coimbatore and proposed something the script does not include an Indian startup, with Indian capital, building India’s own chip factory.
Manickam, founder and CEO of iVP Semi, called semiconductors foundational national infrastructure. He compared them to roads and railways. Furthermore, he said Coimbatore not Dholera, not Sanand should be where India begins building that infrastructure from within.
The Man Behind the Proposal
Manickam’s record in the semiconductor industry spans three decades. He graduated from IIT Kharagpur and spent formative years at Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor. He subsequently founded Tessolve, a chip testing and design services firm that according to company records reached Rs 1,000 crore in annual revenue before its acquisition by Hero Electronix. He also served as the founding CEO of Tata Electronics’ packaging division before starting again.
In September 2023 he incorporated IndiaVP Semiconductor Private Limited iVP Semi in Chennai. Per RoC Chennai filings, the company had 42 employees as of May 2025 and reported revenue of Rs 23 lakhs for FY2024-25, reflecting its early pre-volume commercial stage. According to corporate filings, iVP Semi has raised USD 5 million in seed funding and holds paid-up capital of Rs 6.99 crore. In March 2026, TIDCO Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation completed a direct equity investment of Rs 10 to 15 crore in the company.
Currently, iVP Semi designs power components MOSFETs, diodes, IGBTs, and voltage regulators for solar, industrial power and electric two and three-wheeler markets. Wafers are fabricated at Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation in Taiwan. Packaging is handled in Malaysia and the Philippines. Design centres operate in Chennai and Bengaluru alongside a 20,000 square foot testing facility in Chennai built with TIDCO support.
Why Coimbatore
The location is deliberate. Coimbatore has spent decades building a precision engineering and MSME ecosystem first around textiles and motor pumps, more recently around tool design, machining and industrial power electronics. Manickam has noted that semiconductor manufacturing equipment depends on thousands of high-precision mechanical components. Coimbatore’s manufacturers are positioned to supply them at scale.
Tamil Nadu’s semiconductor strategy under TNSM 2030 already reflects this thinking. The state plans dedicated equipment parks in Sulur and Palladam specifically to leverage the region’s capital goods engineering base. Additionally, US-based Yield Engineering Systems signed an MoU to invest Rs 150 crore over ten years to build a semiconductor equipment centre in Coimbatore creating 300 direct jobs an early signal that global players see the city’s potential independently.
The Model and the Numbers
Manickam’s proposal directly challenges the megafab-first logic that has dominated India’s semiconductor conversation. Per his estimates presented at KCT, an 8-inch mature-node power semiconductor fab can be built in India for approximately USD 350 to 400 million roughly Rs 2,900 to 3,300 crore. That is a fraction of the USD 11 billion the Tata-PSMC 12-inch silicon fab in Dholera requires.
He has proposed a public-private model where the central government contributes USD 200 million in subsidy with private equity and strategic partners covering the remainder. The focus would be power semiconductors the components that manage energy flow in EV motors, solar inverters and industrial machinery. These run on mature fabrication processes. They are also precisely what India’s fastest-growing industries consume in the largest volumes.
Chinese foundries have flooded global markets with mature-node power chips, creating a supply dependence that an indigenous Indian fab would directly address. That strategic rationale gives the proposal weight beyond its founder’s personal ambition.
What Tamil Nadu Has Formalised
The state’s support for iVP Semi is documented across several formal agreements. In December 2025, Guidance Tamil Nadu signed the TN 100 Chip Varsity MoU with iVP Semi witnessed by Chief Minister M.K. Stalin committing to chip design labs across engineering colleges and training 5,000 students annually. In April 2026, SRM Institute of Science and Technology signed a strategic MoU for collaborative chip design and power semiconductor research. TIDCO’s equity investment was completed in March 2026.
The Coimbatore fab itself is the next stage in that progression one the state has signalled alignment with through its TNSM 2030 framework and equipment park planning, even as the formal MoU process for the fab site is yet to be concluded.
The Policy Landscape
Within the India Semiconductor Mission, the central government has committed approximately Rs 70,000 crore of its Rs 76,000 crore ISM budget across ten approved projects two silicon fabs and eight packaging units. iVP Semi is currently positioned under the Design-Linked Incentive scheme aimed at fabless startups.
The DLI scheme has faced disbursement delays across its 24 supported companies, a situation Manickam addressed directly at KCT: “These are designers and technologists. Once they qualify, give them the money. Audit later.”
His proposed fab would require application under the ISM Semiconductor Fabs Scheme a separate and larger capital incentive pathway. That process and the private equity mobilisation it would need alongside it, represents the next significant milestone for the project.
An Idea India Has Been Waiting For
Every fab approved under ISM so far carries a foreign name in the technology column PSMC, Tower Semiconductor, Micron. Those partnerships matter and the fabs they will build are genuinely consequential. However a country that wants to own its semiconductor future eventually needs companies that own the process itself, not just the address.
Manickam is attempting exactly that. He has done it once before building a Rs 1,000 crore company in a sector India was not supposed to compete in. The Coimbatore proposal carries that same conviction: that India does not need to wait for permission from a foreign partner to begin making its own chips. Whether the capital, the policy pipeline and the infrastructure align in time is the question the coming months will answer. For now, the proposal is on the table and it is the most Indian semiconductor story India has told itself in a long time.
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