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India’s first indigenously designed commercial microcontroller is likely to be launched in the next six-to-seven months by Chennai-based Mindgrove Technologies, its co-founder and chief executive Shashwath T R told FE. The company has begun production of its Secure IoT chip.
“We’ve finished the prototyping and the design changes required after testing. If all goes to plan, we want to launch the chip by September-October this year,” he said.
The Secure IoT chip has applications across wearables (smartwatches and headphones), connected home devices (smart locks, speakers, and smart fans), smart city devices (electricity, water and gas meters), access control devices (biometrics), and devices such as thermal printers and point-of-sale (POS) machines, in addition to EV battery management.
A microcontroller is a small, low-cost computer-on-a-chip designed to control specific devices or tasks.
The quantum of production will be decided over the next few weeks as the firm finalises contracts with companies requiring the microcontroller, Shashwath said. As it prepares for commercial production of the first chip, the design startup is also in the process of finalising the design of its second chip — the Vision SoC chip.
Aimed at high-performance edge computing and video processing applications, Vision SoC (System-on-Chip) will be suited for applications and devices whose functions involve identifying and processing video information. This chip will find applications in devices like CCTV cameras, dashcams, video recorders, automotive ADAS, smart TVs, and other devices with video processing functions. The firm received approval from the ministry of electronics and information technology for the development of the second chip under the design-linked incentive scheme in September last year.
“We should start prototyping the chip the Vision SoC chip in the coming months, and expect it to go into production by mid-2026,” Shashwath added.
Mindgrove is a fabless semiconductor design startup launched in 2021, and raised $8 million in series A funding in December last year.
The funds raised were mostly used for enabling the prototyping of the Secure IoT chip, which has to be done in foundries outside India since there are no such domestic facilities.
“Prototyping actually costs more than production because there are limited slots a foundry can give you on the semiconductor wafer. In production, you have the full wafer, and the quantity to be manufactured is significantly higher, which brings down cost,” Shashwath explained.
Typically, prototyping involves the production of 100-1000 chips to test and verify. Due to the small scale of production, design firms need to book production slots with foundries which can cost up to $100, 000 a slot, making prototyping a cost intensive step in the process.
Currently, semiconductor foundries are concentrated to in Taiwan, China, US, and South Korea. While full scale manufacturing facilities are not available in the country yet, there are facilities that carry out packaging and testing going online in India.
“Packaging is an important aspect of logistics in this case since the close to India the packaging takes place, the less logistics cost we incur,” Shashwath added.
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