As India begins its chip-making journey, fabless semiconductor startup Mindgrove Technologies said that it has launched the country's first commercial, high-performance SoC (system on chip).

Called 'Secure IoT,' the RISC-V (open-source architecture)-based chip will help domestic original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) use a homegrown chip in their devices.

The IIT Madras-incubated startup said that the chip is likely to cost 30% less than other chips in the same segment.

Mindgrove designed and sent out the chip for manufacturing within eight months, which is faster than industry standards of two to three years.

“We set out to design chips that target the middle market,” said Shashwath TR, CEO and Co-founder of Mindgrove.

The chip is a high-performance microcontroller clocked at 700 MHz. It can control devices — from smartwatches to smart city devices like connected electricity, water, and gas metres — to connected home devices and even EV battery management systems.

The chip is designed to provide programmability, flexibility, security and superior computing power for controlling applications on a wide range of connected smart devices, it said.

The country consumes over a billion chips a year and anywhere between 10 to 50 million of them can be replaced by 'Secure IoT'.

The pandemic revealed the wide gap between high-end and low-end players in the embedded systems space, with the latter prioritising cost and volume over the chip’s actual performance, Shashwath said. "This led us to set out to design chips that target the middle market."

Shashwath said that there is widespread demand for microchips worldwide, and that “we expect global buyers to be excited about a new option from India.”

The country will need semiconductors worth USD 90 - USD 100 billion by FY26, largely driven by mobile manufacturing.

Secure IoT offers a wide range of features and is intended to be used with bare metal code or any microcontroller RTOS (real-time operating system), thus opening up arenas like traffic control systems, autonomous vehicles, medical equipment, etc., Mindgrove said.

Mindgrove was founded by Shashwath and Sharan Srinivas J and is backed by Peak XV Partners, Speciale Invest and Whiteboard Capital.

Article Source - IANS