India's Semiconductor Import Bill: $9.4B From China, and Who's Actually Building the Alternative

India imported $9.4 billion of semiconductor devices from China in FY2024-25 — integrated circuits, memory chips, transistors, diodes, and the equipment to make them. That's roughly 35% (34.6%, precisely) of everything India imported in this category from the entire world that year. Meanwhile, Deeptech Navigator's own registry counts 583 semiconductor startups and 5,402 patent filings nationally — the smallest patent base of any sector we track with material import exposure.

Those two numbers, read together, are the actual story. This briefing breaks the import bill down product by product, checks which pieces already have a credible domestic company behind them, and names the ones that don't — rather than treating "semiconductors" as one undifferentiated $9.4B opportunity.

Why this page exists — and how to read it

"India needs to build semiconductors" is not a specific claim you can act on. This is an attempt at a more specific one: which semiconductor products, not the sector as a whole, show heavy import dependence and thin domestic patent/company activity — versus which ones already have real teams working on them. The numbers come from three places kept separate throughout: India's own trade data (import values, by product and by country), Deeptech Navigator's patent and startup registry (who's actually building), and public reporting on government policy (what's being funded, and on what timeline). Where the patent-search matching produced a shaky result, that's flagged, not hidden — a "no domestic company found" line is treated as a finding, not a gap to paper over.

The import bill, product by product

FY2024-25 China-origin imports, ranked by value, for the ten largest semiconductor-device product lines:

Photovoltaic cells, LEDs, and mounted piezo-electric crystals also sit in this HS customs chapter by classification — combined $3.24B of China imports — but the domestic patent activity behind them turns out to be solar-panel manufacturing and lighting-fixture engineering, not chip fabrication. They're a separate story and excluded from the totals above; see Methodology.

Where India already has real teams

The strongest domestic cluster is fabless chip design, concentrated in Bengaluru. A non-exhaustive list from Deeptech Navigator's registry, matched against the specific product lines above:

• SiliConch Systems — USB-C and mixed-signal ASICs, 28 patents, the largest patent count of any startup in this sector, acquired by L&T.
• Steradian Semiconductors — 4D imaging radar ICs and modules for automotive and industrial use, 20 patents — the second-largest patent count in the sector.
• Krutrim — full-stack AI infrastructure including silicon chip design; $74M raised, the best-funded company in the sector.
• Vervesemi Microelectronics — ML-enhanced analog and mixed-signal chips for industrial, energy, motor control and avionics applications; $10M Series A.
• FermionIC Design and MMRFIC Technology — RF beamformers, power-management ICs and mm-Wave/RF solutions for 5G, radar, defence and aerospace — the closest thing to a domestic answer to the $238M amplifier import line, even though no single "amplifier" technology category exists in the patent data.
• izmomicro and Sahasra Semiconductors — advanced packaging and NAND flash assembly/test/mark/pack (ATMP), matching the $47M packaging-parts import line directly. Sahasra is worth a precise note: it packages and tests imported memory dies, which is adjacent to but distinct from designing memory chips.
• Raana Semiconductors — India's first private Czochralski crystal-growth company, producing silicon, germanium and lithium niobate wafers; a direct match to the $753M manufacturing-equipment import line, since this is literally the upstream material that equipment processes.

This lines up with how Deeptech Navigator's own sector page independently characterizes the space — concentrated in "semiconductor packaging, analog and power device design, and display-centric technologies" — which is an encouraging cross-check: two different methods (patent-cluster analysis and product-level import matching) point at the same conclusion.

The whitespace

Memory chips and discrete diodes are the two products on this list with real, large import bills and no domestic company we could find building them — not weak activity, an empty search result. For memory specifically, we checked all 42 patent-holding startups Deeptech Navigator has tagged to this sector, one by one — power management, RF, imaging, verification tooling, RISC-V cores, but not one memory-chip designer among them. For diodes, the closest patent cluster ("power semiconductor devices," 16 patents) is filed almost entirely by foreign multinationals — Hitachi Energy, Shindengen, Wolfspeed — plus one patent each from IISc and IIT Madras. No domestic company appears in that list at all.

Whether that's a genuine open opportunity or a sign that these specific segments are uneconomic to enter without a fab is a real question this data can't answer by itself — it's the kind of gap that's worth a direct conversation with someone building in the space, not a conclusion to draw from patent counts alone.

What Delhi is betting on

India's semiconductor demand has been growing at roughly 19% a year, and by one industry estimate roughly 95% of it is currently met through imports — a cumulative outflow estimated at $150 billion since FY2017, projected toward $240 billion by 2035 as total demand approaches $200 billion (Institute for Competitiveness).

The policy response has scaled up considerably. India Semiconductor Mission 1.0, launched in 2021, had approved 10 fabrication and packaging projects worth roughly ₹1.6 lakh crore by December 2025. The Union Cabinet approved ISM 2.0 on July 15, 2026, with a fiscal outlay of ₹1,27,500 crore. As of that same month, twelve manufacturing units had been approved — one silicon fab, one silicon carbide fab, one gallium nitride display fab, and nine packaging (ATMP/OSAT) units — with commercial production already underway at three: Micron, CG Semi and Kaynes (IMPRI policy update). Tata Semiconductor's Dholera fab, India's first commercial-scale facility, is targeting first chips in 2028 at 50,000 wafer starts a month.

On the design side specifically — the segment where this briefing found India's real existing strength — the government's Design Linked Incentive (DLI) scheme currently supports 24 startups, 14 of which have raised roughly ₹430 crore in venture funding combined, and the next phase targets enabling at least 50 fabless companies (DQ India). The DLI scheme's own six focus domains — compute, RF/wireless, networking, power management, sensors, and memory — notably include the exact segment this briefing found emptiest. Whether that's the DLI scheme trying to seed a gap it already knows about, or a target that hasn't produced a company yet, is worth watching over the next few funding cycles.

Methodology, stated plainly

Trade figures are FY2024-25 values from India's Trade Intelligence & Analytics (TIA) Portal, HS8-level, cross-validated against a parliamentary PIB annexure on API/chemical China-dependence (90/90 codes matched within rounding tolerance) and reconciled against the portal's own reported grand totals (sector sums track TIA's TOTAL row within 0.1%). Patent, startup and funding figures are Deeptech Navigator's own registry, current as of 2026-07-22.

Domestic-company matches were found by searching Deeptech Navigator's technology/sub-theme index against each product's customs description, then manually reviewing every result — this is a curated first pass, not an automated production matching system, and it has a known false-positive mode: photovoltaic cells, LEDs and piezo-electric crystals all share HS chapter 85 with genuine semiconductor devices by customs classification, but their strongest technology matches turned out to be solar-panel manufacturing and lighting-fixture patents, not chip fabrication — so they're reported separately rather than folded into the headline "semiconductors" figure. "No domestic company found" means no match surfaced in this search, not proof no such company exists anywhere in India.

One further caveat worth naming: a meaningful share of chip supply that customs data attributes to mainland China may in practice be routed through Hong Kong, which has become a major re-export hub for chip trade into and out of China (Bloomberg) — this briefing reports China as TIA's customs data labels it, without attempting to unwind Hong Kong re-exports.

In our data

Sources

• As SEMICON 2026 arrives, where does India's chip ambition really stand? — Institute for Competitiveness ↗
• India Semiconductor Mission 2.0 (2026) — IMPRI ↗
• India to target enabling at least 50 fabless semiconductor companies in next phase — DQ India ↗
• Fabless Semiconductor Startup Vervesemi Raises USD 10 Mn in Series A Funding — Entrepreneur India ↗
• Booming AI Chip Trade Seals Hong Kong's Role as Gateway to China — Bloomberg ↗