MeitY unveils Digital India futureLABS for creating next gen technologies

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology unveiled the Digital India futureLabs on February 3 at IIT Delhi

The IT ministry on February 3 unveiled the Digital India futureLABS with an aim to create the next generation of systems in automotive, industrial IoT, communication, compute, and strategic electronics sectors.

Through this platform, which has been established at IIIT Delhi, large Indian and foreign companies, Indian startups, and domestic labs including those within the government, will partner to develop these next generation of electronic system designs, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Rajeev Chandrasekhar said.

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing will be the nodal body within MeitY to anchor this platform.

"The whole idea (of the lab) is to create a collaborative framework where open technological platforms will shape the next generation of electronic system designs," Chandrasekhar said while speaking to reporters after the inauguration of the Digital India futureLABS.

"The funding for this platform will come from MeitY's R&D budget, R&D budgets of various labs, including C-DOT and other labs and the larger Rs 1 lakh crore that the government of India is providing," he added.

On February 1, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that a corpus of Rs 1 lakh crore will be established for loans at low and or nil interest rates to encourage the private sector to scale up research and innovation in the sunrise sector.

A vision statement issued by the IT ministry says that through the futureLABS, research will be taken up in the automotive sector, specifically in areas such as automobile-specific integrated chip designs, in-vehicle infotainment chipsets, and so on.

In the computing sector, futureLABS will also take up research in quantum computing, including the development of an indigenous 100 Qubit quantum computer by FY 2027-28.

In the communication sector, research will be taken up for the 6G cellular technology stack. In strategic electronics, the government aims to take up research in developing autonomous ocean vessel, underwater gliders, torpedo tracking ranges, and so on.

For industrial IoT, the government has set its aims to develop self-powered ICs by FY 2027-2028; low powered communication stack for IoT; time-sensitive algorithms, and so on.

Additionally, the Digital India futureLABS will also include the setting up of a research and innovation knowledge repository and platform, where data-sharing can take place between stakeholders.