19 Semiconductor Startups Powering India’s Technology Growth

India is on the verge of a revolution in the semiconductor sector, fuelled by the country’s increasing focus on technical growth and independence. Emerging tech firms have increased during the last ten years, leading to innovations in various fields, including artificial intelligence, space technology, and electric cars. Among these developments, the semiconductor industry has experienced notable growth, owing to government programs that encourage creativity and regional production.

With initiatives like the Semicon India program and the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM), the Indian government has fostered the development of semiconductor designing businesses, fabless chip startups, and packaging companies. By implementing the Design Linked Incentive (DLI) Scheme and the ‘Make in India’ drive, the nation is making substantial strides towards decreasing its dependency on imported components, ultimately becoming a worldwide semiconductor production centre.

Agreements with multinational behemoths such as AMD, Qualcomm, and Micron and increasing venture capital investments in the country’s semiconductor industry have laid the foundation for India’s technical strength. Since the 1970s, the government has concentrated on developing its semiconductor ecosystem, and a new wave of entrepreneurs is laying the groundwork for an industry boom predicted to reach a value of $150 billion by 2030.

A Brief Outlook on Semiconductor

A semiconductor is a substance that may serve as the foundation for electronic devices like computers because of certain electrical properties. Usually, it’s a solid chemical element or mixture that conducts electricity in some situations and not others. As a result, it’s the ideal medium for controlling electrical current in household appliances.

An insulator is a material that cannot conduct electricity, whereas a conductor is a substance capable of conducting electricity. The characteristics of semiconductors lie between those of an insulator and a conductor. Semiconductors are used to make transistors, integrated circuits (ICs), and diodes.

Conductance is sensitive to changes in the intensity of visible light, ultraviolet, X-ray, and infrared (IR) radiation and changes in the current or voltage provided to a control electrode. The impurities, or “dopants,” introduced to a semiconductor determine its particular characteristics.

Semiconductor devices, including changeable resistance, may show many beneficial features, such as the ability to carry current more effortlessly in one way than the other and the ability to respond to heat and light. They are used for energy conversion, switching, and signal amplification.

Therefore, they are widely used in practically every industry. The businesses that produce and evaluate semiconductors are seen as very reliable predictors of the state of the economy as a whole. With semiconductor components present in a broad spectrum of consumer and commercial items, including cars, computers, mobile devices, and personal gadgets, the semiconductor business is incredibly significant to the US and global economies.

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Glimpse of Semiconductor Industry in India

India’s semiconductor ecosystem has experienced significant growth largely due to government assistance for startups in fabless chip manufacturing, semiconductor architecture, and packaging.

The Semicon India initiative was approved by the Indian government in 2021. It allocated INR 76,000 Cr to offer incentive assistance to enterprises involved in semiconductor packaging and design, compound semiconductor/sensor fabs, silicon semiconductor fabs, and display fabs. The India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) was established in 2022 to create a thriving semiconductor and display ecosystem to facilitate India’s prominence as a worldwide electronics design and manufacturing centre.

To support different stages of semiconductor development and deployment, such as Integrated Circuits (ICs), chipsets, Systems on Chips (SoCs), Systems and IP cores, and semiconductor-linked design, the government launched the “Semicon India Future Design: Design Linked Incentive (DLI) Scheme.” Moreover, these activities have been propelled in recent years by the “Make in India” campaign, which aims to strengthen the home tech sector and lessen reliance on imported components.

Currently, India has agreements with several multinational conglomerates involved in the semiconductor industry to set up production plants there. With the arrival of additional venture capital-backed businesses and the investments made in India by firms like Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Micron, and Qualcomm, the country’s semiconductor sector is expected to grow even further.

Amid all this, on February 29, the Union Cabinet approved the Tata Group and Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (PSMC), establishing the nation’s first semiconductor factory. It is essential to note that the nation’s shift towards expanding its semiconductor ecosystem began in 1976, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Cabinet approved the establishment of the Semi-Conductor Laboratory in Mohali, Punjab.

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19 Semiconductor Startups Powering India’s Tech Prowess

Below is the list of 19 semiconductor startups powering India’s tech growth:

·  AGNIT Semiconductors

AGNIT Semiconductors was founded in 2019 and is an expert in gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductor technology. With its main office in Bengaluru, the firm specialises in creating electrical components and GaN materials (wafers) mostly used in radio-frequency applications.

The telecom and defence industries use AGNIT’s GaN components extensively.

In 2023, the Ministry of Defence signed a contract with AGNIT to research and develop sophisticated GaN semiconductors for the forthcoming generations of wireless transmitters for military use, such as electronic warfare jammers and radars.

·  Aura Semiconductor

Established in 2011 by Srinath Sridharan, Aura Semiconductor, also known as Aurasemi, is a fabless semiconductor business that develops and provides mixed-signal integrated circuit solutions for the industry across various applications. Enterprise timing, portable audio, and Internet of Things radios are just a few of the high-performance items in the startup’s portfolio.

It produces goods in several areas, including sensors, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), power, RF, and the Internet of Things. SiTime Corporation, a precision timing firm listed on the Nasdaq, has purchased all Aurasemi’s time-related products. Aurasemi is a Bengaluru-based company operating in China, the UK, and the US. One of the startup’s venture capitalists is Celesta Capital.

·  Blueberry Semiconductors

Based in Bengaluru, Among the top VLSI (very large-scale integration) startups in India is Blueberry Semiconductors. In the specialised fields of ASIC/SoC, embedded product engineering backed by ML, industrial IoT, and AI offers services and solutions.

The 2017-founded company provides clients cutting-edge solutions for their most recent and complex projects in various sectors, including RAM, AI, 5G, automotive, aerospace, and defence. Its partners are Microsemi, SanDisk, Mahindra, Intel, and others.

·  CalligoTech

Calligo Technologies is a fabless semiconductor and systems firm headquartered in Bengaluru.  It globally supports high-performance computing, big data, and AI/ML markets. A co-processor called CalligoTech can calculate using the Posit number system created in 2017. The firm introduced TUNGA, an 8-core RISC-V CPU with Posit support, in June 2024. It asserts that it is the first in the world to achieve this.

According to the business, TUNGA’s energy-efficient design reduces electricity consumption and is extensible for a variety of HPC and AI applications. The federal government’s DLI program also benefits the startup.

·  Chipspirit

Chipspirit is a semiconductor services and solutions business with its headquarters in Bengaluru. Founded in 2018, the company’s ASIC design services mostly focus on design and turnkey projects. However, it also asserts that it offers completely configurable hardware security solutions.

The Abhed-1 from Chipspirit is a safe, specialised, hardware-based encryption device that can be used both offline and online to transfer classified data across open or public networks. In March 2019, the semiconductor manufacturer triumphed in the iDEX competition. As part of the Center’s Make-In-India campaign, it is now working with Indian Defence to co-develop its hardware security solutions. According to its website, Chipspirit is also a beneficiary of MeitY’s DLI initiative.

·  Cientra

Cientra is a semiconductor solutions business founded in 2015 by Uday Joshi and Sandip Kadtane. The firm specialises in VLSI, ASIC, FPGA, and SoCs and serves the telecom (4G, 5G, IoT), automotive (SDV, ADAS, connection, EV), and embedded software industries.

The firm offers analogue design and layout, physical design, verification, register-transfer level (RTL) design, and other semiconductor design solutions. Cientra is an international business operating in Germany, the USA, and India. In collaboration with Amantya Technologies, the business unveiled a vendor-neutral 5G IoT aggregator solution last year, claiming it to be the “first in the world.”

·  FermionIC Design

FermionIC Design, a fabless semiconductor firm in Bengaluru, was founded in 2020 to create integrated circuits for the high-speed wireline and radio frequency communication markets. Its current product offering is a highly integrated silicon-germanium (SiGe) beamformer core chip, which facilitates X-band millimetre-wave communications for applications such as satellite communications and active electronically scanned arrays (AESA).

Low-phase noise crystal oscillators, ultra-low-noise low dropout (LDO) integrated circuits, and Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes) devices are all part of the startup’s mixed signal product portfolio.

FermionIC Design was founded by Gautam Kumar Singh, Prasun Bhattacharyya, Abhra Bagchi, and Shabaaz Syed. So far, the company has operated entirely on Kickstarter. It states that many OEM customers in India and worldwide are adopting FermionIC components to develop their systems and SoCs.  One of the first groups of companies chosen under the government’s Semicon India Future Design DLI plan was FermionIC Design, which was unveiled by Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the Minister of State for Electronics and IT, last year.

·  InCore Semiconductors

InCore Semiconductor, founded in 2018, is producing RISC/RISC-V processor cores of the fifth generation in India. Reduced Instruction Set Computing, or RISC, is a microprocessor design that uses fewer computer instruction types, allowing computers to run faster.

Arjun Menon, Gautam Doshi, GS Madhusudan, and Neel Gala created InCore, which has its headquarters in the IIT Madras Research Park. Peak XV Partners contributed $3 million to the business in 2023. The firm wants to turn India into a RISC-V solution industry leader. Its processing cores power high-performance application-class processors, embedded processors with optimised area/power, and other devices. The business says it would significantly automate designing SoCs and processors.

·  Mindgrove Technologies

Mindgrove Technologies is a semiconductor startup located in Chennai. It was established in 2021 and operates in the field of SoC design and manufacturing. Mindgrove, established at IIT Madras, powers its chips with native RISC-V Shakti cores.

The firm is presently developing Secure IoT, its first chip intended for use in various consumer electronics equipment, such as refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines, and TVs. The chip’s multi-processor features a one-time programmable memory, a genuine randomly generated number generator, and security accelerators.

Shashwath T R and Sharan Srinivas J founded the company, which received $2.32 million in seed capital from Peak XV Partners in 2023. Whiteboard Capital and Speciale Invest are two of its other investors.

·  Morphing Machines

A fabless semiconductor firm called Morphing Machines creates IP goods and solutions. The company’s patented many-core SoC platform, “REDEFINE,” allows domain-specific architectures (DSAs) for mixed critical application tasks to be constructed on demand in response to any event. DSAs are specialised, optimal hardware designs for certain industries or application domains.

Its technology benefits several sectors, including communications, automotive, and avionics. In addition, “REDEFINE” facilitates the acceleration of several applications, including large-scale scientific simulations, immersive gaming, genomic analytics, augmented and virtual reality, and big data analytics.

Additionally, Morphing Machines has been awarded projects by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under the DLI and Chips2Startup (C2S) programs.

Morphing Machines is a bootstrapped firm established in 2005 under the Indian Institute of Science at Bengaluru’s Technology Entrepreneurship project. Its founders are Dr S.K. Nandy, Dr Ranjani Narayan, and Deepak Shapeti. Led by Speciale Invest, Morphing Machines raised $2.76 million in a seed fundraising round in June 2024.

·  Netrasemi

Netrasemi is an Edge AI semiconductor technology business in Kerala founded in 2020. It builds SOCs to meet the modern demand for efficient computing for smart IoT goods. To allow this, Netrasemi has a large silicon intellectual property (IP) portfolio and an energy-efficient deep-neural AI acceleration core (NPU).

Its main target markets are Robotics, drones, autonomous vehicles, industry 4.0, smart sensors, machine vision, surveillance, and smart infrastructure.

The company’s IP-rich SOCs, domain-specific architecture (DSA), flexible SDKs, AI development tools, and platform reference designs enable IoT product and solution providers to launch powerful AI chipsets that are both affordable and energy-efficient, tailored to their respective domains.

The A2000 SOC offers smart vision capabilities, cutting-edge real-time video insights, and vision computing capabilities. Conversely, the RISC-V-based SOC for smart applications involving sensors is called NETRA-R1000. Additionally, Netrasemi benefits from the DLI program run by the central government.

·  Oakter

Original Device Manufacturer (ODM) Oakter creates and produces electrical smart gadgets, such as the ground-breaking soundboxes made by Paytm, a finance behemoth. Founded in 2015 by a group from IIT Delhi, Oakter, a company in Noida, quickly rose to prominence in the smart appliance industry. The firm partnered with Amazon to introduce Alexa in India in 2017.

The firm changed its focus to contract manufacturing in 2019. Over the years, Syska, Saregama (for Carvaan), Sony (for its BRAVIA TV), and other companies have placed several B2B contracted manufacturing orders with Oakter. 2020 saw Oakter and DRDO work together to produce Covid safety goods.

The firm has also partnered with ElectricPe, an EV charging aggregation network, to improve its charge stations using the latest technology. Binny Bansal, the creator of Flipkart, and IndiaQuotient were among its early sponsors. According to public data, the firm is anticipated to have raised more than $500K in total capital throughout the years.

·  Saankhya Labs

Saankhya Labs, established in 2007, is the nation’s pioneering fabless semiconductor solutions provider. The firm is based in Bengaluru and produces integrated circuits (ICs) and other parts for a range of satellite and broadcast applications, such as satellite communication modems for Internet of Things applications, direct-to-mobile (D2M) broadcast, remote internet connection, and 5G New Radio.

Additionally, the business asserts that it has created the first Software Defined Radios (SDR) chipsets in manufacturing history. These chipsets allow radio signals to be converted into electrical signals and vice versa for various applications, such as set-top boxes and smart TVs. Hemant Mallapur, Vishwakumara Kayargadde, and Parag Naik founded Saankhya Labs, a division of Tejas Networks, a publicly traded broadband and wireless networking firm. Former investors in the firm included General Motors and Intel, both of which left a few years ago.

Saankhya Labs’ application to the Center’s semiconductor Design Linked Incentive (DLI) program for the development of a System-on-Chip (SoC) for 5G telecom infrastructure equipment was recently authorised by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in February 2024.

According to publicly accessible data, the firm has raised approximately $18 million. Inc42 was unable to confirm the precise amount raised thus far, though independently.

·  Sensesemi

Established by Vijay Muktamath in 2014, Sensesemi develops the next-generation secure connected AI Edge semiconductor for various Industrial IoT applications, including smart appliances, healthcare, and automobiles. SenseSoC is the brand name of its flagship product.

It says that edge inferencing, which allows devices to make decisions in real-time, is made possible by directly integrating AI capabilities into the chip. Earlier this year, Sensesemi was also granted financial assistance under the Center’s DLI Scheme.

·  SignOff Semiconductors

One of the first Indian businesses in the field of semiconductor design services, Signoff Semiconductors was established in 2015. The company, which provides large-scale integration (VLSI) services, has created internal resources to assist clients in designing integrated circuits (ICs), including field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), that are used in general-purpose processors, AI, ML, and Edge IoT applications.

Full bespoke analogue and digital layout and verification, firmware, register-transfer level (RTL) design, embedded design, and physical design are just a few services that Signoff says it can provide to its clients.

The semiconductor business has provided services to the consumer electronics, automotive, medical, and linked-edge industries. Currently, Signoff has offices in the US, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Toronto.

·  Silizium Circuits

Silizium Circuits is an analogue radio frequency (RF) intellectual property firm in Hyderabad. It creates in-house intellectual property (IPs) for various wireless applications, such as smart mobility, 5G, IoT, GNSS, and AI/ML. In 2020, Silizium Circuits was founded to replace Indian imports of analogue RF intellectual property (IP) by 2025. By 2030, the company hopes to become India’s biggest exporter of mixed-signal, analogue, and RF IPs.

Silizium Circuits qualified for the NXP FabCI 2021 cohort in 2021, a two-year program that combines incubation and acceleration. Established by Rijin John and Dr. Arun Ashok, Silizium Circuits offers a faculty-enhancing program to mentor, educate, and enhance the skills of the nation’s faculty members who teach electronics and electrical engineering.

·  Terminus Circuits

Developed by Dr. Sankar Reddy, Terminus Circuits was founded in 2010 and specialises in developing high-speed serial lines. These links allow data to be delivered concurrently with clocking information by transmitting information via a single divisional signal.

The firm provides a one-stop shop for all designing needs related to serializers/De-Serializers (SerDes). In addition to Ethernet SerDes, it is a top supplier of USB, PCIe (peripheral component interconnect express), and MIPI (mobile industrial processor interface) to OEMs for use in 5G, server chips, big data, AI, and ML applications. One of the largest chip manufacturers in the world, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), has partnered with Terminus Circuits.

·  VASBEAM

VASBEAM is a cutting-edge semiconductor and electronically steered antenna (ESA) design firm. It provides comprehensive solutions to the aviation, defence, marine, and civic sectors. VASBEAM, a recipient of the Center’s DLI program, has effectively finished tapering down their main beamforming IC product line, which covers the 800 MHz to 18 GHz frequency range. Numerous applications, such as 5G communication systems, radars, satellite systems, and more, are supported by this product range.

The business has created antenna testing equipment (VASATD1) to provide accurate evaluations of the antenna array, among other goods.

·  Vervesemi

Vervesemi is a fabless semiconductor firm founded in 2017 that specialises in creating application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for wireless devices and sensors. The business is divided into two verticals: analogue IPs and analog-RF ASIC-Data converters. It creates goods and analogue intellectual property solutions for various semiconductor application industries, including consumer, energy, 4G/5G, healthcare, and smart power.

Vervesemi, situated in Noida, currently has two design facilities in India. It announced earlier this year the introduction of ASIC semiconductors built in India. According to a MeitY announcement last year, Vervesemi was one of the initial businesses chosen for the Semicon India Future Design DLI program. The business says it has more than 25 trademarks in its portfolio.

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Conclusion

These startups are establishing India as a worldwide leader in technology and influencing the future of the semiconductor industry in that nation. In the next ten years, chip design advancements, communication technologies, and AI-powered solutions are expected to spearhead India’s technical progress.

Watch these businesses closely as they push boundaries and aid in developing India’s semiconductor industry. India’s semiconductor sector is expanding significantly thanks to large government investments and well-thought-out policies. India’s semiconductor ecosystem is expected to grow to US$100.2 billion by 2032, with high employment objectives and the potential for innovation and economic growth.

The development of domestic capabilities depends on programs like the Semiconductor Fabs Scheme and the Semicon India Program. Skilled experts must take advantage of new prospects and advance India’s technical leadership and long-term economic success.

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