Designing the World's Chips, Owning None: Why DRDO Wants India to Hold a Chokepoint, Not the Whole Stack

Talent Is Not Sovereignty: The Chip Stack India Draws but Does Not Own

Here's what's actually happening underneath the DRDO warning. A chip is not one product. It is a chain of four separate capabilities and a country controls a chip only if it controls enough of that chain that no one can switch it off.

1. Design: the architecture, the software tools used to lay out billions of transistors and the licensed building blocks of intellectual property.
2. Fabrication: the foundry, where a design is printed onto silicon wafers.
3. Materials and equipment: wafers, specialty chemicals, gases and machines.
4. Assembly and testing: packaging the finished die so it can be used. India's famous strength sits in the first layer, but only as labour. About 20% of the world's chip-design workforce, over 300,000 engineers, works in India. Much of that work has historically been done for global fabless firms, so the resulting IP belongs to them.

The Architect Analogy and Where It Breaks Think of

Indian chip engineers as skilled architects drawing towers for foreign developers. The drawings are excellent, but the land, the cement, the cranes and the title deed belong to someone else. The analogy breaks at one point and that point makes India's position worse.

An architect at least owns the pencil. A chip designer often depends on design-automation tools and IP licensed from abroad. DRDO's Dr Anesh Sharma reportedly placed US leadership in exactly this area: design automation, system architecture and IP.

So even the layer India is "good at" is not fully under its control. The other layers are thinner still:

• Dr Sharma said India currently has no real expertise in fabrication, materials or semiconductor products.
• Industry reports estimate that more than 90% of chip-making equipment and 85-90% of specialty chemicals and gases will still be imported.
• India's chip import bill reached US$ 30.30 billion in FY25. In wartime, that is not a trade statistic. It is a list of switches someone else holds.

Why the Answer Is a Niche, Not a Replica

The sharp part of DRDO's argument is what it does not claim. Its scientists said India cannot lead the whole ecosystem by 2047. Instead it must lead some domains, because a country that owns something others need gains leverage: others listen. That is chokepoint logic turned around. Today, India is exposed to other countries' chokepoints. The 2047 goal is to hold a few of its own, such as:

• 2-nanometre chips and 3D structures - photonic integrated circuits, which use light instead of electrons to move data - neuromorphic chips, which are built to imitate the brain's way of processing DRDO reportedly picked the last two because it has already started work there, hoping for early IP leadership. The proof that the approach can work already exists inside DRDO. In 2023, its Solid State Physics Laboratory developed indigenous gallium nitride MMICs, the high-power chips behind AESA radars. One material, mastered at home, closed one exposure.