Cricket exit poised to be third strike for India
Article By : Peter Clarke
Foreign players are wooing Cricket Semiconductor to build the analog and power pure-play foundry in their region.
« Previously: Why India may lose Cricket wafer fab
If Cricket does pull out of India, it could represent a third strike for the sub-continent.
Lou Hutter, a former Texas Instruments executive working on the project, said: "Interestingly, a number of other countries have talked to us about siting this project in their region; all are places where the factors discussed above are eliminated entirely or greatly diminished. We are very confident in our specialty wafer fab strategy and the positive economic impact it will have on the country where it is built."
After working for Texas Instruments, Hutter worked as senior vice president at Dongbu HiTek (Seoul, South Korea) where he created and ran an analog foundry business unit.
Meanwhile, one of the Cricket team has moved on. Former Globalfoundries executive Aabid Husain, joined Cricket Semiconductor as chief marketing officer in July 2015. Husain has now been hired as vice president of business development and sales at Atomera (Los Gatos, Calif.), a semiconductor materials intellectual property licensing company.
![[india aabid husain (cr)]](/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/04/india_cricket_blog_eetimes_news_husain_cr.jpg)
Figure 1: Former Globalfoundries executive and current Cricket Semiconductor CMO, Aabid Husain.
In March 2014, after several years of discussion, the Indian government launched a plan to build two digital fabs. In 2016 local cement and infrastructure company Jaiprakash Associates pulled out of a consortium formed to build a wafer fab in Greater Noida in Uttar Pradesh, which included IBM and Tower Semiconductor. The second consortium, comprising HSMC Technologies, STMicroelectronics and Silterra Malaysia, has proposed to set up semiconductor wafer fabrication manufacturing facility in Gujarat. However, in the second half of 2016 that group was reportedly trying to attract equity and debt funding.
First published by EE Times Europe.