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Forthcoming book

Sivakasi to Silicon Valley via Singapore

A working engineer's account of a global semiconductor career, and a field guide to how India becomes a semiconductor and advanced manufacturing hub through localisation and ecosystem building. Written for the technician who wonders how far the ladder goes, and for the policymaker who wonders why the fab is late.

Forthcoming

Sivakasi to Silicon Valley via Singapore

Venkatesh Kumar PandurenganA semiconductor career, and India's

What the book is about

Three places, one industry, and what it takes to build it somewhere new.

Sivakasi is where I learned to work. Singapore is where I learned the fab. Silicon Valley's OEMs are who I built teams for. The book follows that route and then turns to India: the projects, the gaps, the people, and a practical argument for execution over announcement.

  1. A fireworks town and a diplomaSivakasi, the polytechnic, and the first machines
  2. The tester does not lieInfineon and ASE: wafer probe, final test, first silicon
  3. An empty ballroomMicron Fab10 and the anatomy of a fab startup
  4. Coming home to teachTurning floor knowledge into curriculum
  5. Seven countries, one standardBuilding engineering teams for the world's OEMs from India
  6. The DPRWhat a Detailed Project Report must get right, and the HCL–Foxconn programme
  7. Capital attracts projects. Execution builds industries.The five pillars of India's semiconductor execution
  8. Wafers on wheelsWorkforce, inclusion, and the ecosystem that outlasts any one fab

Stories from the floor

Field notes, each with the lesson it left behind.

Short versions of stories the book tells in full. Every one is a lesson I still use.

Infineon, Singapore

First silicon arrives at 4 p.m. and nobody goes home.

Bringing up a new microcontroller with the design team: probe cards, DIB boards, the first wafer map, and a night of correlating what the tester said against what the designers expected.

Lesson: yield is a conversation between design and test. The tester is where the chip tells the truth.

ASE, Singapore

The handover meeting is the real shift.

Ninety specialists and thirty setup technicians across three shifts. What was said, and what was left unsaid, at 6 a.m. decided the next twelve hours more than any tool did.

Lesson: a floor is run by its handovers. Make them honest and make them short.

Micron Fab10, Singapore

A hundred tools, one calendar, no slack.

Leading a CVD module through a 300 mm fab startup: rigging windows, hookup crews, SAT after SAT, and the discipline of not releasing a tool until the process owner signs.

Lesson: a fab startup is a physical schedule. Protect the calendar like it is the product.

Tech Semiconductor, Singapore

Two hundred to three hundred millimetres is a people problem.

Converting a fab across wafer sizes with AMAT, TEL, Novellus and Lam in the same bay, and shift teams of technologists who had to relearn tools they thought they knew.

Lesson: conversions fail on habits, not hardware. Retrain before you reinstall.

Tech Mahindra, seven countries

One configuration standard from Portland to Pune.

Global deployment programmes for OEM clients across the US, China, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and India, with 450+ engineers who had to do it the same way everywhere.

Lesson: scale is a documentation discipline. If it is not written, it is not the same.

HCL, India

Every number in the DPR will be tested by concrete.

Leading the Detailed Project Report for the proposed HCL–Foxconn ATMP/OSAT facility: capacity, tools, utilities, headcount, approvals, and the humility of knowing the site would check the maths.

Lesson: a plan written by people who have done it survives. A plan written by people who have read about it does not.

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