New Delhi: Cyient Ltd will start supplying a locally patented 40-nanometre (nm) chip to clients building smart electricity meters by June, according to the two top executives.
The system-on-chip (SoC), built over two years with an investment of ₹150 crore by Hyderabad-headquartered, Cyient-backed semiconductor design startup Azimuth AI, is touted as one of the first privately designed and commercialized SoCs that will commercially power industrial applications and devices. An SoC contains all the necessary components of an electronic processing system on one chip.
“While it is hard to quantify the exact value addition, we’re looking at a local value addition of 20-30% from the chipset for our clients that we are selling to,” Sridevi Badiga, cofounder and chief growth officer of Azimuth, told Mint in an interaction.
While the SoC is production-ready, Azimuth and Cyient are conducting final technical evaluation steps to integrate its chips into smart meters. Deployment will begin as early as June 2026, Badiga said.
Cyient, in a post on 24 March, said the company is targeting the global smart meter market worth $29 billion.
Cyient joins Mindgrove Technologies, an IIT Madras-incubated startup, to develop India-patented industrial SoCs for industrial applications. Their efforts align with the government’s push to locally manufacture chips and develop a related ecosystem to counter global supply-chain shocks and become self-sufficient in technology.
“There will be more such opportunities. The goal is that when a chipset is patented, about 70% of this design and patent is reusable in a modified SoC that will cater to another sector,” said Krishna Bodanapu, executive vice-chairman and managing director of Cyient. “While we’re setting off with a chipset for smart meters, we’ll venture into other industries such as power, space and battery management services, which ensure that these critical operations have no backdoors that could pose security challenges.”
Cyient acquired a 27.3% stake in Azimuth AI for $7.5 million ( ₹66 crore) in October last year. On 8 April, it announced the formation of a wholly owned subsidiary, Cyient Semiconductor.
At the time, the company said it was targeting the global semiconductor market, which is projected to generate $2 trillion in annual revenue by 2032.
“We currently have 600 dedicated semiconductor engineers and designers, with 200 of them based in overseas locations. Our goal is to create a portfolio of indigenously designed and owned chips that can then be sold in various markets,” Bodanapu told Mint. “While this chip with Azimuth is a specific one, our intent is really to build a broad portfolio of chips, which can then be put together for various applications.”
Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said at a press conference earlier on Monday that 30 more chips such as Azimuth’s will come out of Indian enterprises.
However, Bodanapu clarified that the smart meter chip was developed without government design or production incentives. “We are in talks with the Centre to understand what support we can get from them, but for now, there were no government scheme subsidies for it.”
SoCs, which have multiple chips on one printed circuit board (PCB), are typically used as a compact processing module in various consumer and commercial electronics applications. On 16 April, Mint reported that the Centre was considering a $4-billion incentives package to boost electronics components, semiconductor design, and other related areas. On 1 May, the government launched a $2.7-billion incentives scheme to boost local electronics component manufacturing.
Semiconductor design and components, however, still await their own scheme. On 23 August, S Krishnan, secretary at the ministry of electronics and IT (Meity), said that the Centre was evaluating the scale of chip design incentives, which would be included in a yet-to-be-announced second tranche of the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM).
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