The software used to design chips
Semiconductors · we cannot produce here
India has one of the world's largest populations of chip design engineers — almost all of them working inside software licensed from three American companies. There is no domestic electronic design automation toolchain capable of taping out a modern commercial chip.
Why it matters
Design is the part of the semiconductor industry India is already good at, which makes the tool dependency the sharpest one. An export restriction on EDA software does not need a factory or a shipping lane to take effect; it is a licence server that stops renewing.
Where we actually are
Academic and government-funded toolchains exist and are used for teaching and for research flows. Domestic processor designs have been taped out, which proves the design capability, but the flows used commercially run on foreign tools.
What it would take
This is a software problem, which makes it unusually well-matched to what India can do — but a commercial-grade flow is decades of accumulated physics models and foundry-qualified libraries, and no foundry qualifies a tool that nothing ships on. Breaking that circle needs a domestic foundry willing to qualify a domestic toolchain.