Multinational companies and homegrown startups are putting Chennai on the map in the semiconductor industry.
Chennai’s growth in the sector is due in large part to engineering graduates from IIT Madras, which recently partnered with Purdue University to offer a dual-degree master’s program in semiconductors. And while most companies in Chennai focus on the design of semiconductors, government incentives and market demand might spur more chip manufacturing in Tamil Nadu.
In the list below, we take a look at some of the top semiconductor companies in Chennai.
Top Semiconductor Companies in Chennai
- Polymatech
- InCore Semiconductors
- pSemi
- Microchip Technology
- SPEL
Semiconductor Companies in Chennai to Know
Mobiveil Inc.’s semiconductor product lineup includes memory controller, flash storage, system-on-chips and interface IP. The products are used in telecommunications, IoT, automotive, flash storage and AI applications, among others. Mobiveil was acquired by GlobalLogic in 2023 and retains a presence in Chennai.
Edveon Technologies specializes in VSLI (very large scale integration) services for semiconductor companies; services include RTL design; design verification, which it says speeds time to market; and validation, including design validation. The company, launched in 2018, is based in Chennai with a U.S. location in Sunnyvale, California.
PRS Semicon, founded in 2021, is a fabless semiconductor company, meaning it designs and sells, but does not manufacture, the items. The company makes products for a variety of domains, including AI and ML and imaging. It’s based in Chennai.
San Diego-based pSemi, formerly known as Peregrine Semiconductors, is a Murata-owned company that designs and manufactures semiconductors integrated into 5G and IoT applications. The company announced in 2021 that it would open a design facility in Chennai due to India’s smartphone manufacturing industry. Engineers at the new facility will design cellular radio frequency (RF) front-end modules, sensor systems-on-a-chip and power management integrated circuits (ICs).
Applied Materials makes systems that make semiconductors. The company says its systems enable PPACt — performance, power, area, cost and time to market — and also help create high-performance and low-power chips. Applied Materials India is based in Chennai.
Microchip Technology, which is headquartered in Arizona, employs more than 2,000 workers in India, where it designs microcontrollers, microprocessors and other technologies. The company announced in 2023 that it will invest $300 million to grow its India presence. Those funds will partially go toward the expansion of its 100,000-square-foot Chennai office, which opened in 2019.
Mindgrove Technologies makes system-on-chips (SoCs) that have built-in security measures, according to the company. It says its chips are suitable for signal processing, IoT, AI inferencing and other applications, and are built with the SHAKTI ecosystem in mind. Mindgrove is based in Chennai.
Polymatech, which was formed by its Japanese parent company in 2007, says it is the first Indian company to manufacture semiconductor chips. The Chennai-based company develops opto-semiconductor chips at its factory in Oragadam, an industrial suburb of Chennai, and in 2023 it purchased a second plant in Krishnagiri. The company plans to invest $1 billion by 2025 to expand its production from 300 million chips to 10 billion chips per year.
InCore Semiconductors is a Chennai startup that designs processors using open-source RISC-V architecture rather than the closed-source ARM architecture used by other semiconductor companies. The company, which was founded by members of Project Shakti at IIT Madras, raised $3 million in seed funding in 2023, which it will use to expand its portfolio and increase its sales and marketing efforts.
SPEL is India’s first and only assembly and test facility for semiconductor integrated circuits (IC), according to its website. Integrated device manufacturers and fabless semiconductor companies across the world outsource assembly, testing, wafer sorting and package design to SPEL, which is owned by Singapore-based semiconductor packaging and design company Natronix.
