Every semiconductor chip that ends up inside a phone, a laptop or a car’s onboard computer passes, at some point in its manufacture, across a small, unglamorous disc of engineered polyurethane. It’s called a chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) pad, and until this week, India didn’t make a single one of them domestically. Every pad used in every Indian fab or research lab had to be imported.
That changed on Saturday, when India’s first hub dedicated to CMP Pad Technologies was inaugurated at T-Works in Hyderabad, set up in collaboration with Japan’s Toho Koki Seisakusho Company Limited. IT Minister D. Sridhar Babu formally opened the centre, describing it as bringing a technology that had, until now, existed only abroad onto Indian soil for the first time.
The unglamorous part of chipmaking that nobody can skip
CMP pads exist to solve a problem that sounds almost mundane but is actually one of the harder engineering challenges in chip fabrication: keeping a silicon wafer’s surface flat. As chips are built up layer by layer — depositing metal, etching circuits, adding insulating material — the surface becomes uneven. Before the next layer can be added with the precision modern chips demand, that surface has to be polished back down to a near-perfect plane, accurate to within nanometres. That’s the job CMP pads do, working in tandem with a chemical slurry to grind and smooth the wafer without introducing defects.
It’s a deceptively high-stakes component. Global industry analysis has pegged the CMP pad market in the range of roughly $1.5–1.6 billion in 2025, and the supply side is tightly concentrated — a handful of companies, mostly American and Japanese, control the large majority of global production. For a country trying to build a domestic semiconductor industry from scratch, depending entirely on imports for a consumable this fundamental is a structural vulnerability, not a minor inconvenience.
Training people, not just building pads
According to the Minister, the new centre’s first job won’t be mass production — it will be building expertise. The hub is intended to offer training and technical support to students, researchers, startups and established industry players, effectively creating a pipeline of people in India who actually understand CMP pad design and manufacturing, a skill set that has simply not existed domestically until now.
Alongside that, the centre plans joint research projects with academic institutions, other research organisations, and both large industry players and MSMEs. The stated target: begin domestic manufacturing of CMP pads within the next 18 to 24 months.
The move fits into a broader pattern across Asia, where countries with growing semiconductor ambitions — India among them — have been pushing to localise pieces of the chipmaking supply chain that used to be taken for granted as someone else’s problem to solve. Global CMP pad demand is dominated by Asia-Pacific manufacturing hubs in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and China, home to fabrication giants like TSMC and Samsung; India’s push to secure even a foothold in that supply chain reflects how seriously the country is now treating semiconductor self-reliance as a strategic, not just industrial, priority.
Whether the Hyderabad hub can go from training centre to functioning domestic supplier within its stated timeline remains to be seen. But for a country that has spent the last several years courting chip fabs and assembly plants, closing the gap on a component this fundamental to the process — however unglamorous it sounds — may matter just as much as the headline-grabbing fab announcements themselves.
