Vikas Bhi Virasat Bhi: India’s journey to chip design sovereignty and deep tech future

Long before the word “innovation” entered common usage, India was already living it. In the furnaces of ancient India, metallurgists forged Wootz steel of such purity that European swordsmiths would spend a thousand years failing to replicate its edge. In the observatories of Ujjain, astronomers calculated planetary motion with instruments carved from stone and brass, centuries ahead of their European counterparts. And in the scriptoria of Nalanda and Takshashila, mathematicians gave the world the concept of zero the silent digit without which no computation, ancient or digital, could ever exist. India’s history is not one of borrowed ingenuity but of civilisational firsts, quietly authored millennia before Silicon Valley had a name. Today, in fabless design studios from Chennai to Bengaluru, a new generation of Indian engineers is carving equally invisible, equally consequential inventions not in steel or stone, but in silicon. It is, in many ways, the same old civilisational instinct at work to conceive what the world has not yet imagined and to build it with quiet mastery. Design: The silent architect of value Semiconductor chip design rarely makes headlines the way a finished smartphone or an electric vehicle does, yet it is the single most valuable link in the entire semiconductor chain. Design contributes up to 50 per cent of the overall value addition in a chip and accounts for roughly 15 to 35 per cent of the Bill of Materials cost of the electronic products it powers. If fabrication is the forge, design is the architects blueprint the layer where intelligence, efficiency and strategic advantage are actually created. For decades, that blueprint was drawn almost entirely outside India, even as Indian engineers staffed the design floors of global semiconductor giants from California to Bengaluru’s own outsourced campuses. The strategic question was never whether Indian talent could design world-class chips that had long been proven inside foreign firms but the question is whether India could design and commercialise them as a nation. Recognising this the Government of India Design Linked Incentive (DLI) Scheme has been steadily building a nursery of Indian startups capable of designing chips for satellite communications, drones, surveillance systems, defence and aerospace platforms, automotive electronics, the Internet of Things, LED drivers, artificial intelligence systems, telecom equipment and smart meters. It is a deliberate bet that the country which once gave the world zero can also give it the next generation of silicon intelligence and that in an era where semiconductor supply chains have become instruments of geopolitical leverage, self-reliance in chip design is no longer optional, but foundational to the vision of a Viksit Bharat by 2047. Aheesa Digital Innovations: A Chennai startup’s VIHAAN moment Among the clearest signs that this bet is paying off is the story of Aheesa Digital Innovations, a Chennai-headquartered fabless semiconductor startup specialising in chips for broadband networking and security. Aheesa flagship product, VIHAAN, is a networking System-on-Chip purpose-built for fibre broadband. The chip journey carries a symbolism that would not be lost on any student of the calendar it was taped out on Republic Day and achieved first-pass silicon success on Independence Day this year. VIHAAN will now proceed towards production tape-out, targeted for 2027. As India expands its digital backbone through optical fibre, 5G and broadband-led services, the demand for domestically designed semiconductor solutions is only growing and Aheesa, through the VIHAAN series and the scaffolding of the DLI Scheme, is positioning itself to meet that demand from within India rather than importing it. Also Read: Book Review | Finding Zero: A Mathematician’s Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers Investor Confidence: Betting on India’s deep-tech future Capital tends to follow conviction and conviction is precisely what Aheesa has attracted. Earlier this year, the company raised close to ₹40 crore from TNIFMC through the Tamil Nadu Emerging Sector Seed Fund, alongside other private investors, to accelerate product development and scale its presence in the semiconductor space. That this funding arrived after Aheesa’s approval under the DLI Scheme is telling government backing did not crowd out private capital, it catalysed it. Investors are increasingly willing to back Indian deep-tech ventures capable of delivering advanced broadband silicon solutions designed, tested and refined on Indian soil a marker of growing global confidence in India’s semiconductor design capabilities, not merely its manufacturing potential. This pattern a government incentive de-risking the earliest, most uncertain stage of deep-tech product development, followed by private capital stepping in once technical feasibility is demonstrated is precisely the kind of public-private sequencing that mature semiconductor economies have relied on for decades. That India is now replicating it, at speed and at scale, suggests the DLI Scheme is functioning less as a subsidy and more as a signal to global venture capital that Indian silicon is investable. From Idea to Product: The ecosystem the government has built Aheesa’s rise is not an isolated success story, it is one visible outcome of a much larger transformation underway in Indian semiconductor design ecosystem. Through the Government semiconductor programmes, state-of-the-art chip-design tools have been made available to 455 organisations, including 350 academic institutions and 105 startups, allowing students, researchers and companies across the country to design chips that were, until recently, the exclusive preserve of a handful of global technology hubs. Companies supported under the DLI Scheme have together achieved more than 30 chip design tape-outs across various foundries and raised over US$100 million in venture capital funding a clear indicator of investor confidence in India’s semiconductor design capabilities. Alongside this, the Chips to Startup (C2S) Programme has enabled 245 chip designs to be taped out by 71 academic institutions, a pipeline built explicitly to meet the workforce requirements of tomorrow semiconductor industry. Together, these numbers describe something more significant than any single scheme with a systematic effort to move Indian talent from the classroom to the cleanroom, from the whiteboard to working silicon. For a country whose engineering colleges have long produced world-class talent for other nation semiconductor industries, the availability of design tools within India’s own institutions marks a quiet [...]