India has quietly built a dominant position in global chip design that most people outside the technology industry are unaware of. With over 3,000 semiconductor design companies and approximately 125,000 chip design engineers — the largest concentration of such talent outside the United States — India contributes to the design of virtually every major semiconductor product sold globally. Companies like Intel, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, NXP, Renesas, Samsung Semiconductor, NVIDIA, AMD and dozens of fabless design houses have significant engineering centers in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai that handle everything from front-end logic design and verification to physical implementation, signoff and post-silicon validation.
The Indian chip design ecosystem began building in the 1990s when Texas Instruments opened its first Indian R&D center in Bengaluru in 1985 and Motorola followed. Over three decades, successive waves of returning Indian-Americans who had built careers in Silicon Valley joined with locally trained engineers to create a deep, self-sustaining talent pool. The IITs, BITS Pilani, IISc and dozens of other engineering institutions produce large numbers of VLSI-trained graduates annually, many of whom go on to postgraduate programs in the USA or join the Indian design centers of multinationals. The talent quality is world-class — Indian engineers lead design teams for some of the most complex chips in production including AI accelerators, 5G modems and high-performance server processors.
NASSCOM data shows that the Indian semiconductor and embedded systems industry reached $25 billion in revenue in FY26, growing at 12% annually. While a significant portion of this is engineering services work for global clients, an increasing share comes from proprietary chip design by Indian companies and joint ventures. Indian semiconductor startups including InCore Semiconductors, Mindgrove Technologies, Saankhya Labs (working on broadcast semiconductors), Signalchip (designing 4G/5G chipsets) and Steradian Semiconductors (automotive radar ICs) are developing indigenous chips that are reaching commercial production, building the foundation for India's ambition to design chips end-to-end domestically.
The government's Semiconductor Mission, launched in 2021 with Rs 76,000 crore in incentives, catalysed the fabrication investment that complements the design strength India already possessed. With Tata Electronics' fab in Dholera expected to commence pilot production of mature-node (28nm and above) chips by 2028, India will for the first time have domestic fabrication capacity to pair with its world-class design capabilities, creating the potential for a complete semiconductor value chain. The Micron ATMP facility in Gujarat, already under construction, will provide crucial packaging and testing capacity that is often as strategically important as fabrication in the modern chipmaking supply chain.
The strategic importance of India's chip design capabilities extends well beyond economic output. In an era when semiconductor supply chain security has become a geopolitical priority, India's deep integration into global chip design networks — combined with its emerging fabrication capacity — positions it as an indispensable partner for Western nations seeking to diversify away from Taiwan-centric semiconductor supply chains. The US-India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies (iCET) framework explicitly recognises semiconductor collaboration as a pillar of the strategic partnership, with US funding supporting Indian semiconductor R&D, talent development and infrastructure through direct investments and technology transfer agreements. India is positioning itself as the "trusted semiconductor nation" that can offer design and manufacturing capacity without the geopolitical risk inherent in extreme concentration in East Asian nodes.
