Mindgrove and Pinetics have signed a deal that will put locally designed silicon inside biometric access systems, smart locks, and cameras.
Chennai-based fabless chip maker Mindgrove Technologies and Pune’s Pinetics, a product design firm, announced a two-year commercial agreement. Pinetics will build system-on-modules around Mindgrove’s processors and sell them to device makers in the security and vision space.
That means original equipment manufacturers and original design manufacturers can now pick a module with an Indian chip at its core, instead of depending entirely on imported silicon. The move plugs a long-standing gap: India has designed and assembled plenty of circuit boards, but the semiconductor inside the product has almost always come from overseas.
The deal matters because it moves the domestic chip conversation from labs and tape-outs to actual products that will ship. Access control and surveillance are high-volume segments in India, and even a small shift toward local chips gives buyers an alternative when import timelines stretch or costs spike. For the two companies, it is a commercial bet. For the industry, it is a signal that raw chip design capability is finally inching into real-world use.
“When domestic product companies choose to build on Indian silicon, it accelerates the entire value chain. With Pinetics, we are putting an indigenous chip at the heart of products that millions of Indians use every day,” said Shashwath TR, co-founder and CEO of Mindgrove Technologies.
Mindgrove operates out of IIT Madras Research Park and has a secure IoT chip already produced on a 28-nanometre process, running at 700 MHz. A second chip for vision workloads like cameras, dashcams, and smart TVs is under development with support from the government’s design-linked incentive scheme. Until now, those chips lacked a clear path into finished goods. Pinetics, with its end-to-end product design and manufacturing relationships, gives them that path. It transforms a bare chip into a ready-to-use module that product teams can design around without reinventing the wheel.
Navin Goyal, CEO of Pinetics, called the chip the hardest dependency to localise and said this partnership changes the equation for customers who want faster iteration, supply resilience, and an India-first product narrative.
The next thing to track is whether more product makers move beyond evaluation and place firm orders.
