bengaluru india today is a digital nation with much of the foundation in place to become a semiconductor nation said randhir thakur president at intel foundry services at the semicon india conference in bengaluru on friday he said the capabilities that india has built in supply chain partnerships innovation entrepreneurship and talent are the right tools for india to become a semiconductor nationlooking at the semiconductor value chain we see that india has a footprint today in several critical steps like ip design solutions and services and odmboard and systems manufacturing to become a semiconductor nation india must capture a broader swath of the semiconductor value chainfocus on semiconductor manufacturing including wafer fabrications packaging and testing he saidsemiconductor manufacturing will become more important than oil reserves in defining geopolitics in our digital future he added unlike oil reserves where we do not choose the location we can flourish and lead in semiconductor manufacturing at the place of our choosing todays concentration of semiconductor manufacturing in a few localised regions will not be sustainable in the long run thakur saidsanjay mehrotra ceo of micron technology and who previously cofounded sandisk said data is the fuel of the global economy and touches nearly every aspect of our daily lives which is driving a technology revolution that semiconductors are at the centre of semiconductors are the brains of modern electronics enabling advances across communications computing industrial automation healthcare education transportation and every other sector you can imagine he saidhe said memory and storage are particularly critical to the worlds core infrastructure semiconductor chips are classified into two types logic and memory chips the former is the brain of electronic devices like the cpu while the latter stores information micron specialises in memory chipsin 2022 memory chips are forecasted to account for more than 30 of the 639 billion global semiconductor market mehrotra said nearly 60 of the worlds silicon wafers produced today are for memory and storage data driven applications are creating that growth he said mehrotra also said micron sees growing opportunity in indiaas india continues to advance its rapidly growing economy technologies like 5g ai and edge networks will play a transformative role he saidthe quality of indian engineering talent is remarkable and micron is investing in it he added our world class engineering design and delivery teams in hyderabad and bengaluru will cross the 3200headcount milestone this quarter we expect to have 5000 team members at our sites here in the next 23 years