A manufacturing software company is taking a different approach to India’s new semiconductor factories designing the digital backbone before production equipment arrives.
India’s semiconductor manufacturing push is creating factories from the ground up. But one company believes an important part of these fabs needs to be ready before the factory itself is ready. Critical Manufacturing is working on a manufacturing software approach in which the digital manufacturing layer can be designed while a semiconductor facility is still being built. In an exclusive interaction at SEMICON India 2026 with EFY, Augusto Vilarinho, VP Global Sales Critical Manufacturing mentioned that “Instead of waiting for machines to arrive and then connecting them to production software, the company believes the manufacturing processes, controls, and digital model should begin taking shape much earlier.”
The reason is simple: semiconductor fabs bring together highly complex processes and equipment, where losing control of production can become extremely expensive. The company sees the manufacturing execution system (MES) evolving from a system that merely records production into something that helps control and understand what is happening across the factory.
But that is only one part of its approach. The company is also preparing the manufacturing data layer for a future in which AI becomes part of factory operations. Its approach brings production and equipment information together in a way that can eventually allow AI systems to work with manufacturing data more effectively.
The company is already moving towards AI-assisted factory operations, including tools that can help operators understand production events and identify why equipment or processes may be behaving differently. However, it does not see fully autonomous AI factories as an immediate destination. Instead, it views industrial AI as a gradual transition in which reliability and human trust have to be established first.
There is another development that makes this particularly relevant to India. Critical Manufacturing says it has begun working with its first purely Indian semiconductor company, adding to its existing presence through multinational customers and partners in the country.
The company is also looking beyond individual fabs. As India builds a connected semiconductor and electronics manufacturing ecosystem, it sees an opportunity to carry the same digital approach across different manufacturing facilities and eventually use data from multiple plants to identify and replicate improvements. The bigger question is what happens when manufacturing software stops being something added to a factory and instead becomes something the factory is designed around. That is where Critical Manufacturing sees the next shift in semiconductor manufacturing, and its India plans offer an early glimpse of how that could take shape.
Stay tuned for full interview.
