On 4 July 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated commercial production at CG Semi's outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) plant in Sanand, Gujarat (PIB, Jul 2026). CG Semi is a joint venture of CG Power, Renesas Electronics and Stars Microelectronics, with an investment of over ₹7,600 crore (Swarajya, Jul 2026). Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the plant went from groundbreaking to commercial production in 27 months, that its output would serve Indian demand and also be exported to Japan, the US and Europe, and that a second unit nearby was due to be completed by the end of 2026 (PIB, Jul 2026).
For an electronics or electrical engineering student, the useful part of the news is the word in the middle: test. India is not yet fabricating advanced chips at scale. What is running now is packaging and testing, the back end of the chip business, and that back end needs a lot of engineers.
What an OSAT plant actually does
A chip design ends up as a wafer from a foundry: a thin disc carrying hundreds of identical dies. An OSAT takes it from there. The wafer is probed to find which dies work. Good dies are cut out, attached to a package, wired or bumped to its pins, and sealed. Then every packaged part is tested again, often across temperatures, before it ships to the company that will put it in a car, a charger or a meter.
Each step produces data and each step can lose money. A test that is too loose ships bad parts. A test that is too strict throws away good ones. A test that takes three seconds instead of two needs 50% more tester time for the same volume, and testers are expensive machines.
That is why the engineering roles in and around a plant like Sanand cluster around a few kinds of work:
- Test engineering. Writing and debugging the test programs that run on automatic test equipment, deciding limits, and cutting test time without losing coverage.
- Product and yield engineering. Reading wafer maps and bin data, spotting patterns (a bad edge of the wafer, a drift after a maintenance cycle), and working with the foundry or the line to fix them.
- Process and equipment engineering. Keeping die attach, wire bonding, moulding and the rest of the line stable and within spec.
- Quality and reliability. Running stress tests, handling customer returns, and maintaining the documentation automotive and industrial customers demand.
A realistic day
A graduate test engineer's morning might start with a yield report showing one product dropped two points overnight on a single tester. They pull the bin data and find most failures sit in one test: a supply current reading slightly above its upper limit. Is the limit wrong, is the tester drifting, or has something changed on the wafers? They check the same lot on a second tester, compare against the device's datasheet and the characterisation data, and bring a short note to the product engineer before lunch.
Nothing in that morning needs a PhD. It needs a solid grip on how a CMOS circuit draws current, what makes a part fail at temperature, what a scan test is checking, and the patience to work through data instead of guessing.
Skills that are rising
- CMOS basics that you can use, not just recite. Why leakage rises with temperature, what sets switching power, why a gate gets slower.
- Design for test. Scan chains, fault coverage, and how yield connects to the cost of every part shipped.
- Timing. Setup and hold, and why a part that passes at room temperature fails at 125°C.
- Scripting for data. Python for parsing tester logs and building yield charts is a daily tool in most test and product teams.
- Embedded and board-level debugging. Many packaged chips are microcontrollers or power devices; knowing how firmware runs on them, and how factory tests and watchdogs work, makes you useful to customers as well as the plant.
How to start
- Learn to read a datasheet properly. Pick any common microcontroller or power MOSFET datasheet and write down every parameter with a min, typ and max. Ask yourself how a factory would test each one.
- Draw the flow. On one page, sketch wafer to probe to package to final test to shipment. Label where a defect could be caught at each stage and what it would cost to miss it.
- Write one small Verilog block and a testbench. A counter is enough. Make it fail on purpose and watch the testbench catch it.
- Parse a fake test log. Make a CSV of 1,000 parts with a few measurements, set limits, and write a Python script that bins them and reports yield. This is close to what you will do on the job.
Our two engineering courses map onto that list.
VLSI Design Fundamentals starts with transistors as switches, building logic gates in CMOS, and a lesson on delay, power and why chips get hot. Week 2 moves to RTL: writing combinational and sequential logic in Verilog. Week 3 covers static timing analysis for setup and hold and how timing and power get fixed in practice. Week 4 is the part most relevant to an OSAT: why verification takes most of the time, coverage and assertions, and design for test with scan chains and yield. The assignments include a timing analysis exercise and a verification and test plan.
Embedded Systems Essentials (free) covers the device side: what a microcontroller is, the memory map, bare-metal GPIO, timers, interrupts and UART. The final week covers debugging with SWD/JTAG and fault analysis, power and sleep modes, and production testing and reliability with watchdogs and factory tests. That last lesson is the closest you will get, outside a plant, to how a part is tested before it leaves.
Who this is for: ECE, EEE and instrumentation students, diploma holders moving into electronics manufacturing, and early-career engineers in EMS or testing roles who want to understand the chip side of their work.
Who this is not for: anyone expecting to design advanced processors after four weeks, or looking for hands-on time on real test equipment. These are foundation courses; plant-specific tools are learned on the job.
The honest takeaway
The Sanand plants are an early, specific part of the chip industry: assembly and test. That is good news for engineers, because the work is concrete, the skills transfer between companies, and the fundamentals can be learned well before an interview.
Start with the free Embedded Systems Essentials if you are new to hardware, then take VLSI Design Fundamentals for the CMOS, timing and test side. Getskilled membership (₹99 for 90 days) adds live webinars, recordings and a members' WhatsApp community.
