Bengaluru-based startup C2i Semiconductors has achieved a significant milestone by taping out a smart power stage chip designed for AI infrastructure, as reported by Business Standard, Rediff Moneynews, ETTelecom, and Tech News. This development marks one of the recent instances of an Indian startup taking a semiconductor design from concept to tape-out stage. The company emphasized that the chip has been architected and verified entirely in India by its engineering team, representing a substantial shift in India's semiconductor ecosystem capabilities. "This is a proud moment for our team and a reflection of years of focused engineering effort," said Ram Anant, chief executive and co-founder of C2i Semiconductors. "We have built the capability, the team and now the chip, right here in India."
According to Business Standard, Rediff Moneynews, ETTelecom, and Tech News, tape-out refers to the stage where a chip's design is finalised and sent to a fabrication unit for manufacturing. This follows multiple stages of development, including architecture definition, RTL design, verification, and physical layout. As per ET, the company's initial tape-out will have six wafers accounting for about 21,000 chips. The process involves converting the design into photomasks and sending it to a foundry for chip manufacturing on silicon wafers. However, the process doesn't end with tape-out, as chips move into fabrication typically at overseas foundries due to India's limited manufacturing capacity at advanced nodes. "Designed end-to-end in India by a homegrown team of semiconductor engineers, the milestone demonstrates India's growing ability to originate complex silicon IP for some of the world's most demanding compute environments," the firm stated. This represents a significant step for India's nascent chip product ecosystem, which has historically focused more on design services, verification and embedded software than original chip development.
As reported by ET, power management is becoming a bottleneck as companies are beginning to realise that due to AI workloads what used to be few kilowatts of power in a data center rank is becoming 100 kilowatts now. In addition, as data centers draw more power, it generates more heat, which induces lack of reliability. C2i's chip addresses this critical challenge by regulating and optimising power across AI data centre infrastructure, where rising compute demand has sharply increased energy requirements. The company's target market size is about $13 billion within the global power management market valued at over $85 billion. The chip is designed to regulate and optimise power across AI data centre infrastructure, where rising compute demand has sharply increased energy requirements. The announcement comes as India seeks to position itself as a larger player in the global semiconductor supply chain through incentives for chip design, manufacturing and advanced electronics infrastructure.
According to ET, C2i Semiconductors was founded by former Texas Instruments executives Ram Anant, Preetam Tadeparthy, Vikram Gakhar, and BS Dattatreya in 2024. The company has so far raised a total of $19 million from Peak XV Partners, Yali Capital, and TDK Ventures. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan is also an investor and adviser for the company. The startup is working with foundries in China and Taiwan for manufacturing, with the initial tape-out involving six wafers. As per Dattatreya, once they receive the wafers, the firm will test these chips, validate them with customers, check performance, and make changes before going for another round of tape-out. "This could take anywhere from eight to nine months," according to him. The company is working with customers in India and overseas and has IP for the same, with their customers including makers of graphic processing units, central processing units, telecom servers, and embedded processing.
According to Business Standard, Rediff Moneynews, ETTelecom, and Tech News, while India has long been a major centre for semiconductor design, much of this work has been tied to global firms. Companies like Qualcomm have taped out chips with significant design work carried out in India, but these efforts remained part of global development pipelines where architecture, IP ownership, and commercialisation were distributed across geographies. The C2i development represents a shift from contributing to design processes to building and owning semiconductor products, marking a significant advancement in India's semiconductor capabilities. "The DLI Scheme has financially supported 24 projects and 105 companies for advanced chip design tools," said Amitesh Sinha, chief executive of the India Semiconductor Mission and additional secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and IT. "C2i's fundraise followed by design tape-out is a powerful demonstration that Indian innovation can extend across the technology stack, from the power grid to the chip level."
