Semiconductors have a front half and a back half, and India's back half went commercial first: the Sanand OSAT facility cleared its customer qualification audit this week and shipped its first commercial packaging-and-test units — months ahead of the Dholera fab's volume ramp.
The sequencing is the strategy. Packaging imported dies builds the muscle — clean-room discipline, yield management, customer audit culture — that the fab's own wafers will need next year; by qualification day, Sanand's lines had run six months of risk lots for exactly this rehearsal. The first commercial customers: the automotive-electronics suppliers whose demand anchors the whole corridor.
The employment profile answers a persistent scepticism: OSAT is semiconductors' labour-intensive half, and Sanand's first shift is 1,800 technicians, most trained through the ITI-linked programme the consortium co-runs — the PLI pattern of paying for output extended to paying for skills.
The chain now reads: design (Bengaluru, taping out) → fab (Dholera, risk production) → package (Sanand, commercial) → assembly (the $45-billion export machine). Every arrow on that line existed only in policy documents three years ago.
The next audit is the fab's own dies through Sanand's lines — the all-Indian unit. Watch for it around Diwali, on our tech desk.
