[Exclusive] Mindgrove Technologies’ Shashwath TR on Making India&#8217;s Most Secure Chip
The Indian IT Minister Rajeev Chandrashekhar recently lauded Mindgrove Technologies for building globally competitive next gen devices/products, and its contribution to India’s ever evolving semiconductor landscape. “It’s really encouraging coming from someone who actually understands the industry and follows us very closely,” said CEO and founder of Mindgrove Technologies, Shashwath TR, in an exclusive interaction with AIM. He also shared his recent conversation with Prof V Kamakoti (the brain behind Shakthi microprocessor), and said: “This is the first time in my life I’ve gone to a meeting with a politician and talked about how the processor works.” Founded in 2021, Mindgrove Technologies is a Chennai based semiconductor company focusing on the design and production of Systems on Chips (SoCs). Mindgrove has used the Shakti core as the foundation for their SoCs. Shakti is an open-source RISC-V processor core developed by the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M), and backed by MeitY. The fabless startup secured $2.32 million in seed funding last year from investors led by Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV Partners). It told AIM that it looks to raise more funds from the Indian Government and other investors for the upcoming projects. Shashwath said that it plans to raise money in its Series A round for product enhancements and business expansion. Mindgrove Technologies’ Chips Shashwath’s company Mindgrove Technologies is currently working on its inaugural chip Secure IoT designed for a range of consumer electronics, such as TVs, washing machines, air conditioners, refrigerators, and other devices. This multi-processor chip comes with security accelerators, true random number generator, and one-time programmable memory. Mindgrove Technologies said that it has successfully reached the prototype production stage. In the coming months, it looks to launch the prototype. Secure IoT’s production is based on MPW (Multi-Project Wafer). This enables cost-effective prototyping and low-volume production, reducing the cost of a full prototyping wafer run to 10% or even 5% of the initial price. “Typically, during production, the entire wafer is dedicated to one chip. But on a multi-project wafer (MPW), you get 100 chips on that wafer,” said Shashwath, saying that the company is currently waiting on the packaging. “The packaging is going to take a little longer. And once that is ready, we can put it on a board and test it,” he added. Shashwath said that the chip would be ready early next year for shipping. “Q3 and Q4 of 2024 is when we can actually start placing volume orders with the foundry. Then, with roughly three months of lead time, by Q4 of 2024 or Q1 of 2025, we can actually start shipping the chips in large volumes,” explained Shashwath. He further said this has helped them reduce the cost significantly. “We are 50-60% cheaper at the top end of the market,” said Shaswath, saying that they are a little more expensive at the bottom end of the market, but would be of higher quality when compared to subpar or third-grade chips. What’s next? Shashwath said that the next line of products includes Vision SoC and Edge Compute, which will focus on the automotive industry (vehicle infotainment) and edge computing for AI inference, respectively. The Vision SoC is going to be quad-core. “My target is to get a prototype out early next year,” said Shashwath. “A lot of people in the industry — customers, suppliers, partners, government, all of them — needed to take us seriously. That was probably the biggest challenge that I faced,” he said,  noting that many of those who were initially skeptical are now good friends. “We don’t build chips for the sake of building chips. We are building chips to solve problems” concluded Shashwath.
Mindgrove Technologies is currently working on its inaugural chip Secure IoT designed for a range of consumer electronics.
The Indian IT Minister Rajeev Chandrashekhar recently lauded Mindgrove Technologies for building globally competitive next gen devices/products.
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Siddharth is a media graduate who loves to explore tech through journalism and putting forward ideas worth pondering about in the era of artificial intelligence.