Indian silicon: How Mindgrove's first products bring cutting-edge innovation to the 'remaining billions'

For decades, India has been the semiconductor industry's back office — providing the engineering muscle for global giants like Intel and Qualcomm while retaining none of the underlying intellectual property. That arrangement is finally changing.

Mindgrove Technologies, a fabless chip startup spun out of IIT Madras, has launched the S2401: India's first commercial-grade, high-performance microcontroller. The milestone is more than a product launch. It signals that Indian semiconductor startups are ready to move from designing other people's chips to creating original silicon for the world.

A chip built for the gap in the middle

The S2401 is a RISC-V-based System-on-Chip (SoC) designed for the underserved "middle market" of embedded systems — applications that demand more than bargain-bin microcontrollers can deliver, but don't justify the cost of high-end application processors.

The global market has historically been bifurcated: premium processors offer advanced capabilities at premium prices, while low-cost microcontrollers sacrifice security and performance at the altar of volume. Mindgrove co-founders Shashwath T.R. and Sharan set out to close this gap — delivering optimised performance without over-engineering the hardware.

The result is a chip clocked at 700 MHz on a 28nm node, purpose-built for security-sensitive applications such as fingerprint sensors, smart meters, and EV battery management systems. Where comparable microcontrollers in this class typically run at 100–300 MHz, the S2401's headroom enables real-time data encryption and edge analytics without the cost penalty of a full application processor. Critically, Mindgrove expects the chip to be priced approximately 30 percent below comparable imports — a meaningful edge in cost-sensitive markets.

The company expects early deployments in a biometrics product set to reach the Indian market imminently.

Open architecture, sovereign advantage

Mindgrove's technical foundation is the Shakti microarchitecture, an open-source RISC-V core developed at IIT Madras. By building on an open standard rather than a proprietary architecture, the company avoids the licensing royalties that inflate the cost of competing designs — and passes those savings directly to customers.

This approach also carries geopolitical weight. As Washington and Beijing race to insulate their semiconductor supply chains from over-reliance on concentrated manufacturing hubs in East Asia, open-source architectures like RISC-V are emerging as a strategic tool for sovereign hardware development — immune to unilateral export controls and free from the leverage embedded in proprietary instruction sets.

India is positioning itself as a trusted partner in this realignment. Shashwath puts it plainly: "We are inherently global in where we can sell... the semiconductor industry by itself is very globalised. If you want to operate beyond an inflection point, you have to be inherently global to have sustained operations."

The broader tailwind is significant. The global semiconductor market is projected to reach $1 trillion by 2030, and the structural pressures reshaping supply chains are accelerating investment in new geographies and new players.

What comes next

Mindgrove's roadmap extends well beyond its debut chip. The upcoming Vision SoC (2600 series) is a GHz-class processor with vector extensions for edge-AI workloads — think object detection in CCTV systems and ADAS applications. It represents the company's push up the value stack, from embedded controllers toward AI-capable silicon.

Building a hardware company is not a sprint. As co-founder Sharan describes it, it is a "heavy lorry rather than a bicycle" — high inertia, slow to accelerate, but carrying immense momentum once in motion. Validation from global industrial players is beginning to accumulate: Mindgrove has signed an MoU with Bosch Global Software Technologies to test its silicon in automotive and industrial environments.

Architect, not assembler

With production expected to reach one to two million chips this year, Mindgrove is making high-end semiconductor capabilities accessible at price points suited to developing economies — starting with India's "remaining billion" users, but with an eye on the broader global south.

For too long, India's role in the semiconductor value chain has been defined by what it builds for others. Mindgrove is a bet on a different future — one where India is not merely a consumer of the world's digital infrastructure, but one of its architects.