Indigenous avionics-grade microprocessor

Only three nations — the United States, France and Japan — build the avionics-grade microprocessors that sit at the heart of a modern aircraft's flight-control and mission systems. As of 2026, India is not among them.

A microprocessor certified for flight is a hard object. It must survive vibration, electromagnetic interference and extreme temperature swings, run without fault for the life of an airframe, and clear international airworthiness standards before it is allowed anywhere near an aircraft. The core logic is only part of the problem: memory, input-output and communication blocks must all be pre-validated for aerospace use, and the whole assembly demands hermetic packaging and precision cooling. This is why the capability concentrates in so few hands.

India's honest position is emerging. In February 2025, IIT Madras and ISRO successfully booted IRIS — the Indigenous RISC-V Controller for Space Applications — a 64-bit chip derived from the SHAKTI processor baseline, built under the Digital India RISC-V initiative. It is a genuinely end-to-end effort: conceived by ISRO's Inertial Systems Unit at Thiruvananthapuram, designed by IIT Madras, fabricated at SCL Chandigarh, and packaged by Tata Advanced Systems in Karnataka. The design carries fault-tolerant memories and custom aerospace modules including CORDIC, watchdog timers and advanced serial buses. But it remains a prototype, not yet integrated into a production aircraft.

At the systems level, the Defence Avionics Research Establishment has long built airborne computers for Tejas, the Su-30MKI and the Jaguar at 50-plus MIPS performance, and has initiated MIPS-based multi-core processing modules. These integrate the aircraft's brain, but from commercial off-the-shelf components rather than an indigenous core. The Tejas Mk-1 reaches 59.7% indigenous content by value; its imported subsystems remain critical, and the aircraft still flies on the GE F404 engine. Tejas Mk-2 is planned around India's first triple-computer architecture with indigenous mission computers, explicitly to reduce import dependence.

The gap persists for reasons beneath the chip. India's fabrication base runs at 180nm legacy nodes at SCL Mohali, far above the sub-28nm processes advanced avionics need. Radiation-hardening IP libraries are thin, and semiconductor IP for avionics functions is still maturing.

Closing the gap is less about a single chip than the stack under it: advanced CMOS fabrication at 28nm and below, radiation-hardening and fault-tolerance methodology, validated IP libraries, and DO-178 certification depth. IRIS shows the design skill exists. The climb ahead is turning a booted prototype into a qualified, production-scale core.