India's IndieSemiC Teams Up With Semtech on a RISC-V Chip for the Internet of Things

India's fledgling chip-design industry added another data point in late July 2026 when IndieSemiC, a Gujarat-based fabless semiconductor startup, announced a partnership with the US chipmaker Semtech Corporation to develop a RISC-V-based system-in-package (SiP) platform for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The tie-up, reported on 27 July 2026, pairs an Indian design house with an established global supplier and is another sign that the country's semiconductor ambitions are broadening beyond fabrication into design and packaging.

What they are building

The joint platform is a system-in-package that combines general-purpose computing based on the open RISC-V instruction set with long-range wireless connectivity — the kind of low-power, wide-area radio that lets battery-powered sensors talk to networks over kilometres rather than metres. Semtech is best known as the originator of the LoRa long-range radio technology that underpins a large share of the world's IoT connectivity, and marrying that radio capability with a RISC-V compute core in a single package targets exactly the sensor-and-gateway devices that dominate industrial and smart-infrastructure deployments.

Packaging computing and connectivity together in one module matters because it lowers the cost, size and power draw of the end device, and it simplifies life for the product makers who buy such modules. For those customers, a ready-made SiP that handles both processing and long-range communication removes a chunk of engineering work.

Why RISC-V, and why it suits India

The choice of RISC-V is significant. Unlike proprietary chip architectures that require expensive licences, RISC-V is a free and open instruction-set architecture, which lets designers build custom processors without paying royalties to an owner or being tied to a single vendor's roadmap. For a cost-sensitive, sovereignty-minded market like India, that openness is strategically attractive: it lowers the barrier to designing indigenous chips and reduces dependence on foreign-controlled architectures.

IndieSemiC has positioned itself around exactly this opportunity, pursuing IoT and wireless silicon through partnerships with global technology leaders. The Semtech collaboration follows an earlier tie-up between IndieSemiC and Nordic Semiconductor to develop certified wireless modules for IoT applications — a pattern in which the Indian startup partners with proven international players to bring products to market faster than it could alone.

The bigger picture

India's semiconductor push is often described in terms of fabs and assembly plants — the multi-billion-dollar factories rising in Gujarat and Assam. But a mature chip industry also needs a deep design ecosystem: fabless companies that create the intellectual property and products that fabs manufacture. Government schemes such as the Design Linked Incentive programme have been trying to seed exactly this layer, and a wave of Indian fabless startups is now taping out chips at global foundries and striking commercial partnerships.

The IndieSemiC-Semtech deal is a modest but telling example of how that layer is developing: an Indian design firm contributing to a real product aimed at the fast-growing IoT market, in collaboration with a company whose radio technology already sits in millions of devices worldwide. It is the kind of unglamorous, product-level engagement that, repeated across dozens of startups, gradually turns a policy ambition into an industry.

What to watch

The value of such partnerships ultimately shows up in silicon that ships and designs that customers adopt. The questions ahead are how quickly the RISC-V IoT platform reaches production, whether it wins design slots in real deployments, and how much of the core intellectual property IndieSemiC owns versus integrates. For now, the announcement adds to a growing list of signs that India's semiconductor story is moving up the value chain from assembling and testing chips toward designing them.

Sources

• IndieSemiC, Semtech partner on RISC-V IoT platform as India expands semiconductor design ecosystem — DIGITIMES
• IndieSemiC and Nordic Semiconductor Partner to Develop Certified Wireless Modules for IoT — Autocar Professional
• IndieSemiC's Vision: Powering India's IoT and Semiconductor Future — TimesTech