Chennai-based Mindgrove Technologies’ co-founder and CEO, Shashwath T R, informed the media that the company is expected to introduce India’s first commercial microcontroller that was created in-house over the next six to seven months. The business has started manufacturing 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.
In addition to EV battery management, the Secure IoT chip can be used in wearables (smartwatches and headphones), connected home devices (smart locks, speakers, and smart fans), smart city devices (gas, water, and electricity meters), access control devices (biometrics), and devices like thermal printers and point-of-sale (POS) machines.
A microcontroller is a tiny, inexpensive computer-on-a-chip that is used to manage particular objects or operations.
As the company completes agreements with businesses who need the microcontroller, the manufacturing volume will be determined over the course of the upcoming weeks, Shashwath stated. The design firm is now finalizing the design of its second chip, the Vision SoC chip, while preparing for the first chip’s commercial manufacturing.
Vision SoC (System-on-Chip), which is targeted at high-performance edge computing and video processing applications, will be appropriate for devices and applications that need the identification and processing of video data. Devices having video processing capabilities, such as smart TVs, dashcams, CCTV cameras, video recorders, and vehicle ADAS, will use this chip. In September of last year, the ministry of electronics and information technology gave the company permission to create the second chip under the design-linked incentive program.
“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.
In December of last year, Mindgrove, a 2021-founded firm focused on fabless semiconductor design, earned $8 million in series A investment.
Since there are no such domestic facilities, the majority of the money donated were utilized to enable the prototype of the Secure IoT chip, which must be done in foundries outside of India.
“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.
Prototyping usually entails producing 100–1000 chips for testing and validation. Prototyping is an expensive phase in the process since design companies must reserve production slots with foundries due to the tiny scale of manufacturing, which can cost up to $100,000 per slot.
Nowadays, Taiwan, China, the United States, and South Korea are home to the majority of semiconductor foundries. Although there are currently no large-scale manufacturing facilities in the nation, there are facilities in India that do online testing and packaging.
“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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