Aiming to make India self-reliant in chips, the government was looking to expand the Semiconductor Design-Linked Incentive (DLI) scheme to bigger companies and not restrict it only to startups, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the minister of State for IT and electronics, has said on Saturday. 

“We are envisaging that if there is a big Indian or big foreign company that wants to do chip design in India, we should allow the future design scheme to support them too,” the minister said on the sidelines of the SemiconIndia 2023 conference. “Expected outcome of the future design DLI is that we have more indigenously-designed chips, especially in AI, in new cutting-edge areas, data centres and so on,” Mr Chandrasekhar said, adding that there was no reason not to support chip design proposals such as next AI accelerator chip, IoT chip, etc, of big companies. 

The Semiconductor DLI scheme is a part of the government’s Rs 76,000-crore semiconductor incentive scheme. The government has kept aside Rs 1,000 crore for the DLI scheme. 

As a part of the scheme, the government will reimburse 50 per cent of the design-related expenditure incurred by startups with a ceiling of Rs 15 crore. Besides, the government will also provide deployment-linked incentives of 4-6 per cent of net sales turnover over five years, subject to a ceiling of Rs 30 crore per application. The incentives will be provided to approved applicants whose semiconductor design for integrated circuits, chipsets, system on chips, systems and IP cores and semiconductor-linked design are deployed in electronic products.