High-tech industry

Also called: High technology industry · Topic: Secondary Activities: Manufacturing and Industrial Location · NCERT: Class 12, Ch 5 "Secondary Activities"

Meaning

High-tech industry (also called high technology industry) is the newest generation of manufacturing. It uses intensive R&D (Research and Development: organised scientific work to invent new products and processes) to make advanced scientific and engineering products.

It matters because it changed the rules of where industry goes. Older industry went where the coal and iron ore were. High-tech industry goes where knowledge, skilled people and good transport are. This is also the base of today's semiconductor race between countries, including India.

Explanation

How it works: knowledge in place of raw materials

• Main input is knowledge and skill. Raw materials matter much less.
• So high-tech firms are often footloose (not tied to any raw-material site).

• They can locate wherever skilled people, universities and airports are.

• Workforce mix:

• White-collar workers are professionals who do mental work, such as scientists, engineers, designers and managers.
• Blue-collar workers do production work by hand or with machines on the factory floor.
• In high-tech industry, white-collar specialists greatly outnumber blue-collar workers. In the older iron and steel or textile industries, it was the other way round.

Typical high-tech activities

• Robotics on the assembly line: programmable machines do repeated or precise jobs, such as welding and painting car bodies.
• Computer-aided design (CAD): a product is designed and tested on a computer before it is built. CAD is often linked to CAM (computer-aided manufacturing), where the same digital design guides the machines.
• Electronic control of smelting and refining: sensors and computers control the temperature and chemical mix in metal and oil plants.
• New chemicals and pharmaceuticals: new drugs and speciality chemicals keep coming out of laboratory research.
• Semiconductor chips are the "brains" of all electronics, so chip-making sits at the top of high-tech manufacturing. Making a chip has three steps:
• Design: done mostly in the USA (Silicon Valley).
• Fabrication (the "fab"): circuits are printed onto silicon wafers. This needs lithography machines, which are made almost only by ASML in the Netherlands.
• ATMP/OSAT (Assembly, Testing, Marking and Packaging / Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test): the finished wafer is cut, packed and tested.

The high-tech landscape and the technopolis

• What it looks like: low, neatly spaced, modern office-plant-lab buildings spread out over a wide area. There are no massive smoky factories, rail sidings or heaps of raw material.
• Business parks: firms often sit in planned business parks or science parks. These parks help start-ups (new, small, fast-growing firms). Governments use them in regional development schemes to bring jobs and investment to a region.
• Technopolis (NCERT: "technopolies"): a high-tech cluster that is:
• Regionally concentrated: many related firms sit close together in one region.
• Self-sustaining: the cluster keeps growing on its own. Universities train workers, new firms grow out of older ones, and local investors fund new ideas.
• Highly specialised: it focuses on a narrow field, such as chips, software or biotech.

Conditions it needs: why it grows on metropolitan peripheries

High-tech firms usually choose the outer edges of big cities (metropolitan peripheries) because of:

• Cheaper land: campuses need wide, low buildings, and land at the city edge costs less.
• Amenities and quality of life: clean air, housing, schools and green surroundings attract skilled professionals.
• Universities and research labs: these supply ideas, graduates and joint research. Stanford in Silicon Valley is one example.
• Airports and highways: chips and software are light and valuable, so air freight and fast travel matter more than railways or ports.
• Skilled labour pool: the nearby city supplies engineers and managers.
• Venture capital (money put into risky new firms in return for a share of ownership): this paid for the new companies started in Silicon Valley.

Where it occurs

World

• Silicon Valley, USA: an industrial region around the southern shores of San Francisco Bay, California (about 37°N). It covers north-western Santa Clara county as far inland as San Jose, plus the southern bay parts of Alameda and San Mateo counties [10].
• Its intellectual centre is Palo Alto, home of Stanford University [10].
• The name comes from silicon, the base material of the semiconductors used in computer circuits [10].
• In 1956, William Shockley set up the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in the Stanford Research Park [11]. Fairchild Semiconductor was then founded in nearby Santa Clara [12].

• Engineers left these firms to start new companies. Intel, Apple and Google came out of this process.

• Silicon Forest, USA: NCERT places it near Seattle (Washington). The term is most often used for the Portland, Oregon area, where Intel has major plants at Hillsboro. Microsoft and Amazon are in the Seattle area nearby.

• Route 128: a ring highway around Boston, USA. It has electronics and defence firms linked to MIT and Harvard.
• Silicon Fen: Cambridge, England (on the flat Fens). Its software and biotech firms grew out of Cambridge University.
• Sophia Antipolis: a planned science park near Nice, in south-east France.
• Tsukuba Science City: a planned government research city north-east of Tokyo, Japan.
• Hsinchu: north-west Taiwan (about 24.8°N). A science-based industrial park opened here in 1980, with Taiwan's first integrated-circuit plant [13].

• TSMC has its headquarters at Hsinchu and fabs at Hsinchu and Tainan. It was founded in 1987 by Morris Chang, who pioneered the foundry model (one firm makes chips that other firms design) [14].

• Zhongguancun: in Haidian, Beijing. It is called "China's Silicon Valley" and lies near Peking and Tsinghua universities.

• Chip-making leaders: Taiwan leads in leading-edge chips. South Korea (Samsung, SK Hynix) follows, then the USA and Japan.

India

• Technopolises are developing in Bengaluru (Karnataka), Hyderabad (HITEC City) (Telangana) and Pune (Maharashtra). These cities have:
• universities and research institutes, such as IISc in Bengaluru;
• a large pool of English-speaking engineers;
• planned technology parks on the city edge, such as HITEC City;

• international airports.

• India Semiconductor Mission (ISM): notified on 21 December 2021, with an outlay of ₹76,000 crore [4][5].

• India's semiconductor units:
• Micron Technology, Sanand (Gujarat, near Ahmedabad): an ATMP unit approved by the Cabinet in June 2023, with an investment of ₹22,516 crore. It assembles and tests DRAM and NAND memory chips, about 14 million units per week [6].
• Tata Electronics + PSMC (Taiwan), Dholera (Gujarat, on the Gulf of Khambhat): India's first commercial chip fab, worth ₹91,000 crore. It will make 28 nm chips for high-performance computing, and power-management chips for EVs, telecom, defence and automotive uses [2]. It has been notified as a chip fab in a Dholera SEZ (Special Economic Zone) [7].
• Tata Semiconductor Assembly and Test, Jagiroad, Morigaon (Assam, Brahmaputra valley): an ATMP/OSAT unit worth ₹27,000 crore, making 48 million units per day [2][5].
• CG Power + Renesas (Japan) + Stars Microelectronics (Thailand), Sanand: an ATMP unit worth ₹7,600 crore [2].
• Kaynes Semicon, Sanand: an ATMP/OSAT unit approved in 2024 [3].

• The Cabinet later approved two more units worth over ₹3,900 crore [8]. The Semicon India Programme reached 10 approved projects [9]. ISM 2.0 was announced in 2026 [15][16].

• Spatial pattern: Gujarat (Sanand and Dholera) is India's main chip cluster, with industrial land, ports, power and state policy support. Assam is the eastern hub, linked by the government to the Act East policy.

Don't confuse with

• Traditional heavy industry (iron and steel, textiles): it is tied to raw materials and is dominated by blue-collar workers. High-tech industry is footloose, tied to knowledge, and dominated by white-collar workers.
• Silicon Fen vs Silicon Forest: Silicon Fen is in Cambridge, UK. Silicon Forest is in the USA (NCERT: near Seattle; usually the Portland, Oregon area).
• Fab vs ATMP/OSAT: a fab makes the chip by printing circuits on wafers (Dholera). ATMP/OSAT units only assemble, test and pack chips (Sanand–Micron, Jagiroad).
• Technopolis vs an ordinary business park: a business park is just a planned site for firms. A technopolis is a whole cluster that is regionally concentrated, self-sustaining and highly specialised.

Prelims Hooks

• In high-tech industry, white-collar professionals outnumber blue-collar production workers. Robotics and CAD (computer-aided design) are typical features.
• Silicon Valley lies on the southern shores of San Francisco Bay, California. Its intellectual centre is Palo Alto (Stanford University) [10].
• Technopolis–country pairs: Route 128 – USA (Boston); Sophia Antipolis – France; Tsukuba – Japan; Hsinchu – Taiwan; Zhongguancun – China (Beijing); HITEC City – Hyderabad, Telangana.
• The Hsinchu science-based industrial park opened in 1980 [13]. TSMC, headquartered at Hsinchu, was founded in 1987 [14]. ASML (Netherlands) is the key supplier of lithography machines.
• ISM was notified on 21 December 2021 with an outlay of ₹76,000 crore [4][5].
• Trap: Dholera (Gujarat) is a fab (Tata-PSMC, 28 nm) [2]. Sanand (Micron) and Jagiroad, Morigaon (Assam) are assembly and test units, not fabs.

Mains Points

• Location factors have changed.
• Old industry was tied to raw materials, such as steel near coal and iron ore.
• High-tech industry is tied to knowledge: universities, venture capital, skilled workers, airports and pleasant suburbs.

• So technopolises grow on metropolitan peripheries, from Silicon Valley to Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune.

• Concentration brings risk, and countries are responding with policy.

• Most leading-edge fabs are in Taiwan, beside the Taiwan Strait (a narrow sea about 180 km wide between Taiwan and Fujian in mainland China). A conflict, blockade or earthquake there could stop the world's supply of electronics, cars and defence equipment.
• Countries are spreading chip-making across more places: the US CHIPS and Science Act (2022), the European Chips Act (2023) and India's ISM (2021, ₹76,000 crore) [4][5].

• India is moving up from assembly and testing (OSAT) towards a 28 nm fab, with a Gujarat cluster and an Assam hub. Gaps remain: water and clean, steady power for fabs, specialised chemicals and gases, skilled fab workers, and very high capital cost.

• High-tech parks are tools of regional development. Planned science parks and SEZs, such as HITEC City and Dholera SIR, can create jobs and spread growth. But they can also widen the gap between well-connected metropolitan peripheries and lagging regions.

Related concepts

• White-collar and blue-collar workers
• Computer-aided design
• Technopolis
• Silicon Valley
• Silicon Forest
• Global semiconductor hubs

Read more

• High-tech industry and technopolises