Can India design smartphone SoCs when global leaders control foundry access?

Every smartphone assembled in India runs on a brain designed and fabricated abroad. India assembled more than 90% of the smartphones sold domestically in 2024–2025, yet 100% of the system-on-chips inside them are imported — a component that alone accounts for 15–25% of a device's bill-of-materials cost.

A smartphone SoC is among the hardest objects the electronics industry makes: a single die integrating CPU, GPU, modem, and increasingly a neural processing unit, manufactured at the 3–7 nanometre nodes that only a handful of foundries on Earth can reach. Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Apple together supply roughly 75–80% of India's SoC market by value. Globally, five firms — Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung, and HiSilicon — control the overwhelming majority of shipments.

India's fabless design ecosystem is genuinely emerging, but it climbs from a low base and aims at niches, not flagships. Mindgrove Technologies launched India's first commercial high-performance microcontroller, a Secure IoT SoC on 28nm, in May 2024, raising an $8 million Series A that December. Netrasemi taped out its A2000 edge-AI SoC on TSMC's 12nm process, backed by a ₹107 crore round led by Zoho in July 2025. InCore Semiconductors is building tools that compress frontend design from months to minutes. IIT Madras and ISRO booted the indigenous IRIS chip — designed, fabricated at SCL Chandigarh, and packaged by Tata Advanced Systems — in February 2025, with a 7nm SHAKTI processor targeted for 2028.

Under the Design Linked Incentive scheme, 23 chip-design projects have been sanctioned and 72 companies given access to industry-grade design tools. Four of them — 3rdiTech, Netrasemi, BigEndian, and Mindgrove — are designing SoCs for surveillance and CCTV, having taped out test chips in 2025. None is a consumer smartphone SoC.

The gap is structural, and it sits beneath the design layer. India has no domestic foundry capable of sub-28nm production, so every advanced design must be taped out in Taiwan or South Korea. Fan-out and system-in-package assembly is not yet commercially scalable, forcing local chips abroad for packaging and test. Licensed CPU, GPU, and modem IP adds 8–15% to the bill of materials, and specialised architects and physical-design engineers remain scarce.

Closing it means climbing several mountains at once: a leading-edge fab, advanced packaging, a deeper talent pool, and IP independence — the last aided by open-source RISC-V cores like SHAKTI. Tata's ₹910 billion Dholera fab, in site preparation since December 2025 for mid-2027 production, is a first foothold. The competitive distance to a flagship SoC, however, is still measured in years.