The conversation has shifted from backup power alone to total power quality management

Q1: As India moves from semiconductor ambition to manufacturing execution, what are the key infrastructure considerations that need greater attention as new facilities come online?

India’s semiconductor journey has reached a pivotal stage. As India transitions from announcing semiconductor projects to commissioning and scaling production facilities, infrastructure readiness must be treated as a core part of manufacturing strategy—not as a supporting consideration. Government investment, policy incentives, and landmark projects are translating ambition into active construction.

For semiconductor facilities, the quality and availability of utilities directly influence yield, equipment performance, and production economics. Power systems should be planned with adequate capacity, redundancy, monitoring, and the ability to integrate backup generation and future energy sources. The objective is to build facilities that are resilient from day one and capable of supporting long-term expansion.

However, the infrastructure that semiconductor fabrication plants (fabs) demand is far more exacting than that required by conventional manufacturing, and the gap between aspiration and readiness deserves serious attention.

Power reliability is the foremost concern. India’s average grid outage frequency stands at 2.39 events per customer annually, compared with just 0.49 in Malaysia, a well-established semiconductor manufacturing hub. Average outage durations in India are considerably longer. Additionally, voltage sags, grid instability, and regional supply inconsistencies present daily risks to sensitive fab processes.

Water supply, specialist skills, and domestic supply chains for process chemicals and gases also need focused investment. However, power quality and reliability are the most immediate and technically complex challenges to resolve, and they must be addressed at the design stage of any new facility.

Q2: Why is reliable electrical infrastructure particularly critical for semiconductor manufacturing, and what can even momentary power disturbances mean for these highly sensitive operations?

Semiconductor manufacturing involves highly automated and sensitive processes where power quality events have significant operational implications. A semiconductor fab is one of the most power-sensitive industrial environments in existence. A single advanced fab consumes between 50 and 150 megawatts of continuous electricity, comparable to powering a mid-sized city. The requirement is absolute consistency.

Semiconductor manufacturing demands what is often termed ‘six nines’ uptime, meaning power must be available 99.9999 percent of the time. Electrical infrastructure is therefore not a secondary consideration; it is a production-critical input from day one.

Voltage events present immediate risks. ABB notes that voltage sags and swells can affect production, potentially resulting in quality issues and downtime. Sags lasting as little as 10 to 20 milliseconds—events barely perceptible to conventional industrial users—can cause sensitive equipment controllers to shut down instantly. This can ruin entire batches of product in process. Processes including photolithography, etching, deposition, wafer processing, and chip packaging are particularly vulnerable to such disturbances.

Losses from a single unplanned shutdown can reach millions of dollars, including scrapped product, equipment recalibration, cleanroom re-qualification, and lost production time.

As India builds domestic semiconductor capabilities, ensuring that these facilities have robust electrical infrastructure will be essential to building reliable and globally competitive manufacturing operations.

Q3: How is the industry’s approach to power resilience evolving beyond simply preventing outages to protecting productivity, equipment, and operational continuity?

Power resilience is increasingly about maintaining the stability and continuity of critical operations, rather than simply responding to complete outages. For semiconductor facilities, the objective is to protect sensitive processes from a broader range of electrical disturbances and minimise their impact on manufacturing. This is particularly important as India seeks to establish capabilities across wafer fabrication, advanced packaging, OSAT, and other specialised semiconductor segments. The goal is to preserve yield, protect asset investment, and maintain competitive productivity across every production shift.

Accordingly, the conversation has shifted from backup power alone to total power quality management. Most costly production losses are caused by voltage sags, dips, swells, and surges that occur routinely on modern grids. Complete outages, by comparison, are relatively rare.

Leading manufacturers globally are deploying layered power protection strategies, combining:

• Medium-voltage UPS systems to protect large process loads from major grid events
• Active voltage conditioners to provide instantaneous correction of sags and voltage imbalance at equipment level
• Low-voltage UPS systems to safeguard control systems, IT infrastructure, and instrumentation

This approach ensures protection across every point in the power chain, reducing production losses and shielding capital equipment from cumulative electrical stress and premature ageing. A resilient power foundation enables facilities to operate with greater consistency as production scales.

Q4: What role does power quality play in enabling semiconductor facilities to operate reliably, and what are some of the challenges manufacturers need to anticipate?

Power quality is a critical consideration because semiconductor manufacturing processes depend on sensitive and highly automated equipment. It encompasses voltage imbalance, harmonic distortion, and sustained undervoltage that can degrade process repeatability, reduce equipment lifespans, and introduce yield variability that is difficult and costly to diagnose.

Manufacturers must look beyond the availability of electricity to consider the quality and stability of power being supplied to critical process equipment. As facilities become more advanced and energy-intensive, ensuring reliable power infrastructure is essential. Manufacturers entering India’s growing fab ecosystem should anticipate a grid environment where voltage disturbances occur with heightened regularity.

Power quality management must be considered in facility design from the outset, with protection specified at the medium-voltage intake, at individual process tool level, and across the control and IT layer. Retrofitting power quality solutions after production begins is both technically disruptive and significantly more expensive than designing for protection from the start.

Q5: How can ABB Critical Power systems help semiconductor manufacturers protect critical processes and strengthen operational resilience?

ABB has a proven track record protecting semiconductor and high-technology manufacturing facilities worldwide. The portfolio is designed for the layered protection approach that fabs require.

Medium-Voltage Protection: HiPerGuard
HiPerGuard delivers load protection with sub-cycle response to voltage sags and swells. Its patented Impedance Isolated Static Converter (ZISC) architecture eliminates transition switching and enables seamless integration with energy storage, diesel generators, gas turbines, and future hydrogen-based systems. Operating at up to 34.5 kV with over 98 percent efficiency, HiPerGuard is scalable from 2.5 MW to 25 MW in parallel configurations, allowing facilities to match investment to growth. Maintenance intervals of up to ten years and built-in redundancy significantly reduce total cost of ownership.

Equipment-Level Protection: PCS100 AVC-40
The Active Voltage Conditioner provides continuous regulation and instant correction of voltage imbalance, sags, and surges, protecting expensive process tools from cumulative damage and improving yield consistency. Operating at over 98 percent efficiency without batteries, it eliminates battery maintenance costs and floor-space requirements.

Low-Voltage Protection
ABB’s LV UPS portfolio—including PowerValue, DPA UPScale, and PowerWave—protects control systems, automation networks, and facility IT infrastructure, ensuring operational continuity across every tier of the semiconductor facility.

Q6: As India builds globally competitive semiconductor capabilities, what should manufacturers and infrastructure planners prioritise today to ensure reliable and efficient long-term operations?

India’s semiconductor opportunity will depend not only on establishing manufacturing capacity, but on creating a resilient ecosystem capable of scaling over the long term. This requires a holistic approach to infrastructure, with reliability, power quality, energy efficiency, and operational continuity considered during facility planning from the outset. NITI Aayog’s roadmap emphasizes disciplined execution, sustained commitment, and robust infrastructure as critical enablers of India’s semiconductor ambitions.

As facilities become increasingly sophisticated and energy-intensive, investing in supporting infrastructure alongside production capabilities will be essential to building operations that are reliable, efficient, and globally competitive.

Three priorities stand out:

1. Treat power quality as an early-stage design input: Engage power protection specialists early in facility design to specify a protection architecture across medium-voltage intake, process equipment, and control system levels. The cost of getting this right at design stage is a fraction of addressing production losses after commissioning.
2. Select technology with proven semiconductor credentials and lowest total cost of ownership: High-efficiency solutions such as HiPerGuard and the AVC-40 deliver energy savings that compound over a facility’s operational life. HiPerGuard alone offers potential savings of 4.6 GWh and CO2 reductions of 1,360 tonnes over fifteen years compared to conventional rotary UPS systems.
3. Prioritize technology partners with global semiconductor expertise, proven references, and in-country service capability: The technology and service partners chosen today will shape operational performance and competitiveness for decades.

India has the ambition, policy framework, and growing manufacturing ecosystem to become a genuine global semiconductor hub. Ensuring that electrical infrastructure is correctly specified and protected from day one will determine whether that ambition delivers world-class, competitive results.