India’s semiconductor ambitions have attracted chip designers, fab investors, and packaging specialists from across the globe. But the quieter story, the one that actually determines whether a packaging line works well, is about materials. The inks, coatings, and metallization compounds that sit between a chip and the board it lives on are as consequential as the silicon itself, yet they rarely get the headline treatment.
That is starting to change.
Electroninks, the Austin, Texas-based company that has built its reputation on metal organic decomposition (MOD) ink technology, announced on July 13 that it has named Baba Fine Chemicals (BFC) as its official India distribution partner. The deal brings Electroninks’ full conductive ink portfolio into the Indian market, including its CircuitShield EMI shielding product and copper metallization solutions, targeting the country’s fast-growing outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) and electronics manufacturing services (EMS) sectors.
Why India, and Why Now
The timing is not accidental. India’s semiconductor packaging industry is in a genuinely unusual position: much of it does not exist yet. Unlike mature markets in Taiwan, South Korea, or Japan, where established players must retrofit new materials into decades-old processes, India’s greenfield OSAT and EMS lines are being designed from scratch. That creates a window for advanced materials companies to get their technology specified into facilities before the first production run, a far easier path than displacing an entrenched supplier later.
Rakesh Gupta, founder and partner at Baba Fine Chemicals, put it plainly: the goal is to get world-class materials into Indian manufacturers’ hands before they need them, not after. The logic is straightforward. If a packaging line is built from the ground up with Electroninks’ MOD ink-based shielding and metallization baked in from the start, the customer never has to face the painful and expensive process of re-qualifying a new material mid-production.
Melbs LeMieux, co-founder and president of Electroninks, framed the urgency from his side. India’s market is growing rapidly across multiple product platforms driven by global OEMs, and getting in early with a trusted local partner matters enormously in a supply chain as complex as semiconductors.
What MOD Ink Technology Actually Does
Electroninks’ core technology is built around metal complex inks, a class of conductive materials that decompose at relatively low temperatures to leave behind high-purity metal traces. The approach offers advantages over traditional silver paste or solder-based solutions in terms of resolution, adhesion, and compatibility with advanced packaging architectures.
CircuitShield, the company’s EMI shielding product, addresses one of the more pressing challenges in modern semiconductor packaging: as chips get smaller and more powerful, managing electromagnetic interference becomes harder. Effective shielding needs to be applied with precision, and MOD ink-based approaches allow for conformal, additive deposition that traditional methods struggle to match.
The copper metallization portfolio extends that capability to interconnect applications, an area where the industry is paying close attention as it moves beyond traditional wire bonding toward more advanced packaging formats.
The IDSPS Angle Is the Strategic Play
Equally significant is BFC’s entry into the Indian Design, Semiconductor, Packaging and Systems (IDSPS) program, a national initiative that brings together government bodies, academic institutions, and global industry players to accelerate India’s semiconductor R&D, workforce development, and supply chain maturity.
For Electroninks, participation in IDSPS is not just a relationship-building exercise. It is a direct channel into the institutions and decision-makers who will shape India’s semiconductor infrastructure over the next decade. Research institutes affiliated with the program influence procurement decisions, technology roadmaps, and the training pipelines that produce the engineers who will eventually specify materials for production lines.
It is a long game, but it is the right one.
Market Validation Has Already Begun
The companies have not waited for the formal announcement to start generating interest. Electroninks and BFC showcased the technology at the IDSPS program kickoff, Gujarat Semiconnect, and Productronica India 2026. The companies report strong early interest from major Indian packaging customers following these appearances. Given how early-stage most of India’s OSAT ecosystem still is, the pipeline for adoption could develop quickly as those customers move from planning to production.
Gujarat Semiconnect, in particular, has emerged as an important forum for companies targeting India’s semiconductor manufacturing push in the state, which has positioned itself aggressively to attract chip-related investment.
Reading the Bigger Picture
India’s semiconductor packaging market is still in formation, but the trajectory is clear. Global OEMs are actively diversifying their supply chains away from single-country concentration, and India has made the policy commitments, through the India Semiconductor Mission and programs like IDSPS, to position itself as a credible alternative.
For a company like Electroninks, this is a market-entry decision that looks modest today but could prove foundational. The companies that establish material qualifications and supply relationships at the greenfield stage tend to remain incumbents for the lifecycle of those facilities, which in semiconductor manufacturing can span fifteen to twenty years.
BFC brings the local credibility, supply chain navigation experience, and relationships that a foreign materials supplier simply cannot replicate by setting up a local office and hoping for the best. That combination of technical differentiation from Electroninks and local market depth from BFC is a sensible structure for a market where trust and reliability matter as much as performance specs.
India is building its semiconductor industry in real time. The companies that show up early, with the right partners and the right materials, are likely to have a significant advantage over those who wait until the market matures.
Electroninks appears to understand that.
