Electronica India 2026— reviewing PCB manufacturing strategy and pathways for the future of electronics

10 Apr 2026 

At electronica India 2026 I had the chance to connect with original equipment manufacturers in the semiconductor industry. The government of India is pushing hard to build a semiconductor ecosystem in the country and conferences like these give opportunities to manufacturers, researchers and investors to connect with each other and explore avenues for collaboration. 

The entire electronics value chain is vast but one area that has been steadily gaining momentum is domestic manufacturing  of PCBs. Not just the raw substrates but also technologies higher up the value chain, by developing or acquiring tools that can copper clad ,do photolithographic circuit patterning followed by placing components on the pcb to actually make a functional device. 

This process is not as demanding as the actual manufacturing of the IC using the advanced EUV lithography techniques but it is a good start for building domestic capability. A goal that is certainly very achievable without spending decades in research and development. 

This time I got a chance to interact with the OEMs of surface mount technology. Machines that apply the solder paste,pneumatic pickup and place robots and ovens for melting that paste and achieving a tight bonding to the substrate. 

Although less demanding than EUV even at the most basic level of placing already built components on a circuit board, the technology is quite sophisticated requiring complex electromechanical control. These machines would most certainly have very precise servo motors in addition to computer controlled operation. Even those tiny pneumatic grabbers are made up of engineering plastics and ceramic materials. Those components would require very precise engineering to manufacture. 

The technical debt that any organisation undertakes by investing in these technologies is huge. So it remains extremely important to continue to discover new ways of computing and building electronic circuits. 

Several new technologies are being explored precisely to address these concerns. But they are generally deeply embedded within the ecosystem of their own markets. The current semiconductor technology relies on heterogeneous active materials to make transistors. This fundamental building block of modern electronics is in itself a very complex piece of engineering. 

But if one examines the entire electronics industry it spans across more than 40 elements of the periodic table. Centuries of industrialisation have enabled the electronics industry to exist. It's unreasonable to expect that an ecosystem could be built in a few decades without acquisition of huge technical debt. 

Some new developments however promise a much simpler path even as they remain unproven. First nanoscale vacuum channel devices offer a new or rather a fresh new application of an old technology —vacuum tubes — to switch electronic circuits at nanoscale. This allows the manufacturers to simplify the chip architecture. All you need are 2 electrodes separated by a gap and a grid electrode that switches the current through the electron beam in the channel.

At nanoscale these are field emission type electrodes. They can work but at the extremely high electrode voltages required for field emission the chances of degradation are high, raising questions about long term device stability. 

A much more reasonable and far less demanding technology is plasma based , where a cold low pressure gas discharge works as a switching medium. The conductivity in the sheath of the plasma can be tuned by the application of voltage on a third control electrode. By immersing the entire Integrated Circuit in a plasma and controlling the voltage between the electrode and sheath the current through the electrodes can be rapidly switched on and off to drive the logic. This differs from traditional IC because plasma is a fluid medium and the circuit switching capability will depend upon the plasma frequency. 

Another interesting area of inquiry is nanoimprint lithography for enabling low cost high throughput nanoscale patterns on a substrate. A slow initial mask design using a focussed ion beam followed by faster stamping technology could create circuit level features on substrates like glass through controlled pressure. 

Now creating active electrical pathways would be a matter of impregnation of dissolved carbon precursor solution into these features followed by pyrolysis. A standard technique in carbon material synthesis turning what are inherently insulating surfaces into conductive channels. Since plasma provides a switching medium we no longer have to precisely tune the material properties and can simplify our production process. 

Of course this comes with other constraints, especially the additional work that needs to be done in maintaining the plasma state and keeping the device evacuated. But those are far less challenging than EUV lithography. Even capping the device size to say a 100nm gives reasonably powerful computing systems for general purpose and scientific computing use cases. 

Essentially these decisions boil down to the level of risk that organizations are willing to take. For a new technology there is never a guarantee of success but if successful it creates new markets. For an established technology a new entrant can only ever hope to catch up to the competition trading risk with guaranteed return. For  organizations where massive initial investments are not an option, new technology innovation is the only real pathway of gaining access to the market. The downside of risk becomes less relevant because they don't have much to lose. And that is why it's always the new entrants that are disruptive drivers of real change. 

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