Chip maker Micron is planning big investments in India, senior exec says

Micron, a memory chip manufacturer headquartered in the United States with a global reach, sees India as a crucial element in its future strategy. Having started its operations in India in 2018, the company expanded its research and development efforts in Hyderabad in 2019 and is now establishing an ATMP (assembly, testing, and packaging) facility in Sanand, Gujarat.

“We have operations all around the world, in North America. In Asia, we have our manufacturing facilities and R&D facilities in Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore. And we also have facilities in Europe. The big part of this diversity is the thought diversity. Compared to our competitors, we believe that talent around the world can contribute to our success by bringing different thoughts, different experiences, that drive our innovation engine. And that led to our big investment in India,” says Naga Chandrasekaran, Senior Vice President of Technology Development at Micron.

Today, Micron’s R&D Center in Hyderabad has over 3500 team members. Micron calls it one of the unique R&D facilities as while it also does design innovations and design R&D like other companies, it has also got several NAND assessments and is bringing some of the fundamental material science advanced device modeling, which many semiconductor companies in India are not doing.

“But this is only a starting point where we want to go is to continue to drive this advanced R&D investment in India. We also announced our manufacturing facilities in Gujarat, and we will continue to invest in R&D development in that area as well. But overall, we see India as a big part of our long-term growth,” adds Chandrasekaran.

He shares the technology advancement that Micron is driving for memory for smartphones and also on the NAND side for data centers and client applications. Some of these are actually developed at Micron’s Hyderabad R&D facility. “That's why we are continuing to gain confidence as the team in India grows and starts delivering some of these industry-leading products. We know we can invest more, we know we can build a better team, we can drive the full innovation engine for Micron, not just on the product side. We will continue to invest not just in India but globally, but India is going to be a big part of our investment in manufacturing as well as advanced R&D,” he adds.

Globally, Micron has about 44,000 team members, of which about 4000 are in India, which the company intends to grow further.