Moving one step closer to a fully homegrown chip, an Indian startup has successfully designed country’s first indigenously-built microcontroller semiconductor that can offer a cheaper option to consumer electronics goods makers and digital infrastructure in India, providing a boost to New Delhi’s Make-in-India push in the electronics sector.
Mindgrove Technologies, which is backed by Peak XV Partners-backed and incubated by IIT Madras Pravartak Technologies Foundation and IIT Madras Incubation Cell, launched India’s first commercial high-performance SoC (system on chip) named Secure IoT, the firm said in a statement on May 6.
The fabless semiconductor startup claimed that the RISC-V-based chip will let domestic original equipment manufacturers to use an Indian SoC in their devices, which will cut overall costs, the company said. The chip is 30 percent cheaper than the ones available in the market, the company claimed.
A microcontroller chip is a microcomputer embedded inside a system to control a particular function, such as receiving remote signals or displaying information, inside a device. It has one or more processing cores, memory and peripherals.
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The chip can be used in various devices such as smartwatches, smart city devices like connected electricity, water, gas meters, fans, speakers and even in the battery management and control systems of electric vehicles, the statement said.
“The pandemic revealed the wide gap between high-end and low-end players in the embedded systems space, with the latter prioritizing cost and volume over the chip’s actual performance,” said Shashwath TR, chief executive and co-founder of Mindgrove Technologies. “Thus, we set out to design chips that target the middle market. ‘Right-sizing’ has been the key differentiating factor when it comes to Mindgrove, giving it an edge over others, with enhanced flexibility, adaptability, security and cost-efficiency coupled with a robust support system.”
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The chip is a high-performance microchip controller clocking at 700 MHz, and is the only commercially available Indian-made chip in the segment. The startup also provides design support to accelerate innovation and scale of production, it said.
The startup is headquartered at the IIT Madras Research Park in Chennai.
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