Meet the student-professor duo who turned a PhD thesis into a ₹1.5 Cr Make-in-India semiconductor venture that supplies to IITs & Govt labs

There is a saying in the tech industry: the world runs on silicon. And this may not be entirely incorrect. Because if you look around closely, you will see silicon in almost everything. 

In every phone call you make. In every AI algorithm that is being trained. And even in the rockets sent to outer space. Because all these things have one thing in common: semiconductors. 

But here is another surprising fact: as of 2024, India imports around 90% of its semiconductor testing equipment. Since India is a country that sends satellites to Mars, this is a number hard to ignore. Thus, in the past year, we have seen the government put more emphasis on homegrown semiconductors. 

The challenge is not talent. It is the acquisition of tools. For decades, India’s brightest researchers have depended on imported instruments that were rigid, expensive, and often designed for someone else’s experiments. 

Today, we will delve into how a young Indian scientist walked into a Swiss Lab and changed this narrative. 

Dr. Pankaj Yadav, then a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL (Swiss), worked under the mentorship of Professor Michael Grätzel, a respected figure in scientific circles and a four-time Nobel Prize nominee in Chemistry, alongside being one of the world’s most respected experimental scientists.

What fascinated Pankaj wasn’t just Grätzel’s brilliance. It was his lab.

Every instrument, every probe, every measurement setup was built from scratch and crafted not by big corporations, but by Grätzel and his team of technicians and researchers.

When Pankaj asked his mentor why he didn’t just buy equipment from leading German or Swiss manufacturers, Grätzel smiled and said something that would later define SATs’ philosophy: “If I use instruments made by someone else, I am bound by their thinking. My science will always be limited by their design.”

That sentence stayed with Dr. Pankaj, as it was a philosophical one and spoke of intellectual independence, the freedom to think and build beyond pre-defined systems.

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Returning Home to Build

When Dr. Pankaj Yadav returned to India later that year, he not only had the research data, but he also had conviction in India’s capabilities. 

He began exploring India’s landscape of scientific instrument manufacturing, and what he found was alarming: not a single homegrown manufacturer was producing the kind of advanced, customizable equipment needed for modern semiconductor research.

Every probe station, every PEC setup, every cryogenic chamber came from abroad. And when Indian scientists requested even minor modifications, they were told, “That’s not possible.”

“I realised,” Dr. Pankaj Yadav tells Startup Pedia in a candid conversation, “that the limitation wasn’t science, it was imagination. We had the brains, we just didn’t have the belief that we could build for ourselves.”

The Birth of SATs (Incubated in IIC PDEU)

As a professor and active researcher, Dr. Pankaj Yadav began floating the idea to his students: “Who wants to take the risk of building something instead of just studying it?”

Most students hesitated. After all, building instruments was far more uncertain than publishing papers. But one student raised his hand, Darshan kumar Purohit. 

Darshankumar was a PhD scholar under Dr. Pankaj Yadav. Instead of pursuing a conventional research path, he proposed turning his thesis into something tangible: a fully functional, indigenously developed scientific instrument.

“Everyone around me was writing research papers,” Darshankumar Purohit recalls while talking to Startup Pedia.“I wanted to build what others were writing about.”

That was the moment Semiconductor Analysis and Testing Solutions (SATs) was born in an academic lab in Gujarat.

The early days were brutal because: 

> funding was scarce. 

> components had to be sourced manually. 

> every prototype was a battle against malfunction. 

However, when the Indian government’s Department of Science & Technology (DST) approved SATs’ proposal under its Technological Development Program (TDP), things began to move forward. 

By 2019, SATs had successfully developed its first working instruments: fully indigenous, customizable, and priced significantly lower than imported alternatives.

From One Lab to Many

Today, SATs systems power some of the most prestigious institutions in India, IIT Kanpur, IIT Gandhinagar, IIT Mandi, IISER Tirupati, CSIR Hyderabad, Adani Solar, Shiv Nadar University, and several others.

One of their proudest achievements: building a world-class characterisation laboratory at IIT Gandhinagar in just six months — a project that would typically take three years through international procurement.

“We don’t just sell instruments,” Dr. Pankaj Yadav tells Startup Pedia“We build partnerships with scientists. When a researcher comes to us with a problem, we don’t hand them a catalogue, we co-design the solution.”

That ethos has made SATs one of the most trusted names in India’s growing semiconductor research ecosystem.

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SATs product offering 

SATs’ product line reflects both scientific depth and user empathy. Their offerings include:

• Cryogenic and Micro Probe Stations for high-precision electrical characterisation.

• Photoelectrochemical (PEC) Setups for solar energy and materials research.

• Potentiostats and Muffle Furnaces for electrochemical and high-temperature studies.

• Vibration-less Tables designed for ultra-sensitive optical and semiconductor experiments.

• AI–ML–powered Automation Systems that streamline semiconductor testing with predictive insights.

Every product is engineered with three principles: 

1/ Precision. 

2/ Adaptability. 

3/ Affordability.

And every instrument carries a simple promise: to give Indian researchers the freedom to modify, innovate, and evolve without waiting for overseas suppliers.

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From Make in India to Think in India

While “Make in India” is at the core of SATs, the company's vision goes further: to make India think.

“For decades, Indian labs have been dependent on imported tools that dictate how experiments must be performed,”says DarshanKumar in a conversation with Startup Pedia. “We’re flipping that script. We’re saying, build your own instrument, define your own science.”

That commitment has also translated into SAT's mission to assist in green energy research, especially solar technologies, and in fostering research and development through specialised instruments that empower academia and industry.

By integrating AI-driven automation, energy-efficient engineering, and custom scientific design, SATs is quietly building the backbone of India's semiconductor future-one lab at a time.

Future Plans

From an experimental lab project to a company generating over ₹1.5 crore as annual revenue with 50% profit margins, SATs has grown on grit, mentorship, and vision. But both founders stay pretty level-headed.

“We’re still researchers at heart,” highlights Dr. Pankaj Yadav when Startup Pedia asked what drives the team. “The only difference is now, our experiments build companies.”

With expanding partnerships in semiconductor fabrication, solar energy research, and AI-driven automation, SATs is positioning itself at the intersection of science, sustainability, and self-reliance.

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