HackerFab IITB is India’s first open-source, student-run, low-cost semiconductor fabrication lab (fab). We build open-source educational tools (like litho, sputter) to make chips. We extend a global open-source HackerFab community that hacks and tinkers with fabs - HackerFab!
Semiconductors are the cornerstone of modern civilization, quietly powering the entire world, yet, in India, college students seldom get any hands-on exposure to actually building semiconductor chips. HackerFab seeks to fill this gap by building low-cost and open-source fab templates, which can be replicated by students across India. Our component and machining pipelines are tailored for Indian procurement.
The power of open-source has let us cross the moat of the heavily monopolized fab companies like ASML and TSMC. Our active community on Discord suggests tens of improvements daily, and expertise pours in from people across the globe. This tribal knowledge which we crowdsource was not written down previously, and was gatekept by the industry.
Our CAD designs, lithography scripts, control algorithms, and tool GUIs are all open-source on our Github: https://github.com/hackerfabiitb
Our immediate objectives are:
Student Accessibility: Make semiconductor fabrication accessible, affordable, and aspirational for students across colleges in India.
Workforce Development: Start a direct pipeline of industry ready talent by providing real, hands on fabrication experience
Cost Reduction: Lower the cost of fabrication setups from crores to lakhs, indigenizing them for teaching and prototyping rather than for mass production
Replicable Template: Serve as a template that inspires and supports other Indian institutes in creating their own HackerFabs and setting up fabrication facilities all over India.
In our session, we will
present our story from a bunch of students building out of their hostel room, to developing a complete in-house process to make working MOSCAP devices.
discuss how the open-source philosophy enabled our success.
demo our photolithography tool which can project micron-scale features in real-time.
have a open conversation with the participant on how we can leverage the community further.
Read more at https://hackerfabiitb.github.io/
Contact us at hackerfabiitb@gmail.com
- by Jai Bellare, HackerFab IITB
PS: The video linked as a Session Reference is an interview and tour of our lab. We previously presented at two conferences (sadly we don’t have recordings of those):
Invited to present to industry, academic and government dignitaries at the IITB SemiX Annual Summit 2025
Won the User Design Track at the International Conference on VLSI Design 2026.
