Secure IoT – India’s first high-performance SoC (system on chip) for commercial use introduced by Mindgrove Technologies.
The RISC-V-based processor featuring Made-in-India capabilities can now be produced at lower costs.
This has been made possible with the utilization of Indian SoCs by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) without sacrificing premium features.
According to estimates, the chip will cost thirty-percent less than existing chips in the same market.
Secure IoT sports a high-performance microcontroller running at 700 MHz. In this category, it is known to be the only commercially available Indian chip.
The SoC chip from Mindgrove is made to be extremely powerful, programmable, flexible, and secure, enabling it to manage apps across a broad spectrum of networked smart devices.
This chip can operate a wide range of devices, including wearables like smartwatches, smart city gadgets like linked gas, water, and electricity meters, and smart home gadgets like speakers, fans, locks, and EV battery management and control systems, to name a few.
“The pandemic revealed the wide gap between high-end and low-end players in the embedded systems space, with the latter prioritizing cost and volume over the chip’s actual performance,” says Shashwath TR, CEO and C0-Founder of Mindgrove Technologies. “Thus, we set out to design chips that target the middle market. ‘Right-sizing’ has been the key differentiating factor when it comes to Mindgrove, giving it an edge over others, with enhanced flexibility, adaptability, security and cost-efficiency coupled with a robust support system.”
In addition to marketing the indigenously designed SoC chip, Mindgrove offers:
- Design support to Indian brands to accelerate innovation and scale of production in India.
- A significant step towards self-sufficiency and global positioning in the semiconductor and electronics space.
Talking about the market for these chips, Shashwath added, “India consumes over a billion chips a year and anywhere between 10 to 50 million of them can be replaced by Secure IoT. Further, there is widespread demand for microchips worldwide, and we expect global buyers to be excited about a new option from India,” he added.
The chip has successfully undergone MPW tape-out, the silicon industry term for prototyping, at the 28nm node, according to the IITM Pravartak Technologies Foundation and IIT Madras Incubation Cell incubated start-up. Reference boards will be ready for OEMs to test out in the upcoming weeks.
Many capabilities are available with Secure IoT, including:
- A high number of I/Os,
- On-chip one-time programmable memory, secure boot, and important security algorithms implemented as hardware accelerators.
- The device may be used with any microcontroller RTOS (real-time operating system) or bare metal code.
Applications include:
Medical equipment, driverless cars, and traffic control systems.
