Kancheepuram: It’s half past midnight in Kancheepuram’s SEZ. The UV lights are on in what looks like an almost emptied-out factory floor. Its eerie silence is broken by a quiet melodic beep, like an ICU’s heart-rate monitor, and the swish of a robotic arm slicing through air. It’s a new kind of factory soundscape. There are no human beings.
Welcome to India’s only dark factory.
Here lies the sanctum sanctorum of the country’s industrial future—robots assembling semiconductor chips without any human supervision. In what is called a cleanroom, there’s a silent rhythm of titanium hands performing an intricate, choreographed dance, set against the hypnotic loop of a Ganesha prayer.
The semiconductor manufacturing unit, Polymatech, set up in 2018 in Kancheepuram’s Oragadam, stands at the cusp of the next industrial revolution. It’s a hyper-automation setup, turned ‘upside down’, where a handful of people and an army of machines produce goods faster, at a fraction of the cost, without compromising on quality.
“I want the engineers to sit outside the shop floor. I don’t want them to work; it’s only the machines that have to work,” said Vishaal Nandam, director at Polymatech. The robots here work 24×7, with a 30-minute break once a year. The engineers, by comparison, have no fixed shifts.
With the vigour of a well-drilled battalion, robots here assemble the semiconductor chips and printed circuit boards (PCB) that breathe light into mobile phones, laptops, and TV backlights. Precision down to the last nanometre is a non-negotiable key result area (KRA). The robots have their own call signs held up through stack lights affixed to the side of each machine. Red is a hiccup, yellow is ready-to-roar, green is clear sailing.