The trade war between the US and China is the reason why countries like India go to space on their own.
ARM, a company headquartered in the UK, and owned by the Japanese, is no longer licensing technology to Huawei, a Chinese company, due to an export ban by the US. I have no love for state-sponsored Chinese companies; China does not play fair. But US export bans are far reaching and debilitating; India’s oil import bill just went for a toss thanks to fresh restrictions on trade with Iran.
India was hit by US export bans early in its journey. Which is why it learnt to be self reliant in a number of science and technology domains. Unfortunately, it is not independent enough. Self reliance does not come cheap. Even in a country like India, where labour and costs are cheap, and highly trained manpower eagerly awaits big challenges in STEM, it is often better to import technology rather than build our own.
A lot of what we need in defence, aerospace and energy is available off the shelf from international vendors – prebuilt, pretested and proven. Commercial components can be assembled together to give you communications and remote sensing satellites quickly and reliably.
It is only when you push the boundaries of what you are doing in space, do you run out of commercial components. You are outside your comfort zone. You’ve got to spin your own. You need startups and research labs building moonshot components. Literally, because you are going to the Moon now. And further on to Mars.
India’s semiconductor industry is abysmally behind the rest of the world. We don’t have world class fabs. We don’t have our own architectures. We don’t have fabless companies worth speaking of. Heck, no one even does wafer packaging in India.
But even for a country like China that has put everything into being self reliant in the electronics space, independence from the rest of the world does not come easy. TSMC tapes out most of China’s processors. And while China does have architectures of its own, it still uses ARM in telecom/mobile and x86 in its supercomputers.
There is never a commercial case for living in a silo, for building cutting edge technology all by yourself from scratch. Until a trade ban comes along.
When I was in school, a targeted trade ban hit India after the Pokhran nuclear tests. The aerospace department of my school, IIT Madras, was blacklisted. The aero guys had a Beowulf cluster of their own. Linux clusters weren’t big at that time; sgi was big, and we had an sgi supercomputer on campus. I did my postgrad research on Beowulf clusters, building one cluster from scratch, and benchmarking and tweaking multiple clusters in and around campus.
Lakhs of researchers chipping away at tens of thousands of problems give you an environment in which a trip to Mars, successful or not, can take place.
Today, IIT Madras has successfully designed a processor based on the RISC V architecture. Open source, patent and IP encumbrance free, royalty free. It has been taped out in our own semiconductor fabs in Chandigarh. And tested in our own Space Applications Center in Ahmedabad.
Shakti is no Kirin. And it doesn’t need to be. For most strategic applications, it is more than adequate. It gives us an end to end toolchain that is all of our own. Already we have global majors like Thales funding Shakti development, so they can derisk their businesses from future events like the Huawei ban.
When I tell my American friends that 4G pricing is $2 per month for 1.5 GB of traffic a day in India, they refuse to believe me. A large part of the Airtel and Voda-Idea network is powered by Huawei. Android and ARM are early nails in the coffin Trump is building for Huawei, China’s largest electronics company and a global success story. If Huawei keels over, what impact will that have on our telecom networks?
I am no fan of isolationism. But we do not live in a perfect world where everyone shares everything at all times. We need to prepare for events like these, when trade wars lead to disruption. BSNL and RailTel, who use a lot of equipment from Tejas Networks and other Indian manufacturers, will be sitting pretty right now, while the Vodafone team bites its nails and watches this disaster unfold.
Next time you meet someone who questions why India went to Mars, you know what to say.
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