In an interview, Nikul Shah, Co-Founder and CEO of IndieSemiC Pvt Ltd, speaks with TimesTech about building a sustainable, design-led semiconductor business in India. He explains why application-focused chip design, strong ecosystem partnerships, and disciplined capital deployment are critical for long-term success, and outlines where India is seeing real commercial traction beyond policy incentives and headline announcements.
Read the full interview here:
TimesTech: India is investing heavily in building a semiconductor ecosystem. From your vantage point at IndieSemiC, what does a sustainable, design-led semiconductor business model actually look like in India today?
Nikul: From our vantage point, a sustainable semiconductor model in India has to be design-led, application-focused, and tightly aligned with real market demand. India’s strength today lies in system understanding, how chips are deployed in end-use applications such as IoT, surveillance, and industrial electronics, rather than in capital-heavy fabrication. A viable model combines fabless design, strong system integration capabilities, and long-term customer engagement. Sustainability comes from building reusable IP blocks, designing for India-specific operating conditions, and ensuring chips are part of larger platforms rather than standalone components. The goal is not to compete with global giants on scale, but to deliver differentiated, reliable solutions that solve local problems while remaining globally relevant.
TimesTech: Fabless companies avoid the capital burden of owning fabs, but chip design still requires long development cycles and significant upfront investment. How do you manage capital efficiency while ensuring product competitiveness and timely market entry?
Nikul: Capital efficiency in chip design comes from disciplined product definition and phased execution. Semiconductor development is inherently capital-intensive, so the key is to avoid over-engineering and focus on clearly defined use cases. At IndieSemiC, design choices are guided by market pull rather than technology push. We prioritise architectures that can be reused across multiple products and customers, which significantly lowers incremental development costs. Timelines are managed by leveraging proven IP, established EDA flows, and external ecosystem partners instead of building everything in-house. Capital is deployed in stages, aligned with technical milestones and customer commitments, ensuring that investment closely tracks commercial validation and reduces the risk of delayed market entry.
TimesTech: IndieSemiC is developing indigenous chipsets and system platforms aimed at reducing import dependence. What have been the biggest technical and commercial challenges in building locally designed alternatives for IoT and surveillance hardware?
Nikul: Building locally designed alternatives for IoT and surveillance hardware presents both technical and commercial challenges. On the technical side, chips must meet global benchmarks for performance, reliability, and power efficiency while operating in diverse Indian environments. Access to advanced process nodes, validated IP, and testing infrastructure can be constrained. Commercially, convincing OEMs to shift from established global suppliers requires demonstrating long-term availability, cost stability, and system-level support. Import substitution is not just about replacing a chip; it’s about matching ecosystems. The challenge is to offer not only silicon, but also reference designs, firmware, and integration support that reduce adoption friction and make indigenous solutions commercially viable at scale.
TimesTech: You’ve formed strategic partnerships that connect chip design with assured demand in markets like CCTV and embedded systems. How critical is demand visibility in this business, and how do you structure partnerships to reduce revenue uncertainty?
Nikul: Demand visibility is critical in semiconductors because design cycles are long and capacity decisions are made years in advance. Without clear visibility into end-market requirements, capital and engineering effort can easily be misallocated. Our partnerships are structured to tightly link chip development with defined customer roadmaps in areas such as CCTV and embedded systems. These collaborations often begin at the system-architecture stage, allowing us to design chips that are directly aligned with deployment needs. By co-developing solutions with anchor customers and ecosystem partners, we reduce revenue uncertainty, shorten adoption cycles, and ensure that products entering tape-out already have a defined path to commercialisation.
TimesTech: Collaboration with public R&D institutions is part of your approach. In practical terms, how do these partnerships accelerate time-to-market and help manage the capital intensity of semiconductor design?
Nikul: Collaboration with public R&D institutions plays a practical role in accelerating development and managing capital intensity. These partnerships provide access to specialised research capabilities, academic talent, and early-stage validation infrastructure that would be expensive to replicate internally. More importantly, they help de-risk innovation by enabling joint prototyping, testing, and knowledge transfer in emerging areas. For a fabless company, this reduces both development timelines and upfront investment. Such collaborations also help bridge the gap between research and commercialisation by aligning academic innovation with industry-defined product requirements. When structured well, they create a multiplier effect, accelerating time-to-market while keeping capital deployment disciplined.
TimesTech: There is strong investor and policy interest in semiconductors right now. Beyond announcements and incentives, where are you seeing genuine commercial traction in India’s chip ecosystem, and what still needs to fall into place for large-scale growth?
Nikul: Beyond policy announcements, genuine traction in India is emerging in application-driven segments where demand is already visible, such as surveillance, automotive electronics, industrial IoT, and power management. These areas benefit from growing domestic consumption and increasing preference for trusted, locally supported suppliers. What is still evolving is depth across the value chain, particularly in advanced packaging, testing, and scaled manufacturing access. Large-scale growth will require stronger integration between design houses, system OEMs, and manufacturing partners, along with predictable long-term demand. The next phase of India’s semiconductor journey will be defined less by incentives and more by consistent execution, customer adoption, and the ability to compete on reliability and lifecycle support.
