India’s Mindgrove, launches RISC-V based secure MCU

New Products | May 6, 2024

By Peter Clarke

Fabless Indian chip startup Mindgrove has launched what it describes as India’s first indigenously designed commercial high-performance microcontroller.

The company said it can provide design-in support for Indian customers.

Mindgrove Technology Pvt. Ltd. (Chennai, India) was founded in 2021 to design cost and power-effective microprocessor technology in India.

The chip is RISC-V based with a maximum clock frequency of 700MHz and is implemented in a 28nm manufacturing process. It is intended as a secure IoT microcontroller. The company claims it costs 30 percent less than competitor devices.

The company did not indicate who is the foundry supplier but said it has had a successful multiproject wafer (MPW) tape-out allowing it to provide samples to customers and that reference boards will be available for OEMs soon.

The Secure IoT offers a number of security algorithms implemented as hardware accelerators, plus secure boot, and on-chip one-time programmable memory. The chip is intended to be used with bare metal code or any microcontroller

Mindgrove said that the chip will allow Indian original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to use an Indian SoC in their products. The applications are wide ranging and include wearables, smartwatches, electricity, water and gas meters, smartlock, fans, speakers, EV battery management systems, Mindgrove said.

“India consumes over a billion chips a year and anywhere between 10 million and 50 million of them can be replaced by [Mindgrove’s] Secure IoT,” said Shashwath TR, CEO and co-founder of Mindgrove Technologies, in a statement. “Further, there is widespread demand for microchips worldwide, and we expect global buyers to be excited about a new option from India,” he added.