L&T starts building team for semiconductor chip design
Larsen & Toubro (L&T) is building a team for its semiconductor chip design business, as it looks to foray into fabless semiconductor chip design and product ownership.
...J.D. Patil said LTST isn’t looking to be a mass manufacturer of processor or memory chips. Instead, it will play in the highly-engineered category.
“This is not a space where everybody can compete. LTST will focus on customised chips,” he said. It will be a game of ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) and the firm will offer complete solutions. “A chip will be able to do what a full rack can achieve,” he said.
While the chip manufacturing will be outsourced, the design will be done in-house, Patil said. The chip design would look at the automotive and industrial chip segments.
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I expect to see more industrial enterprises with even a bit of capital in hand like L&T to venture into chip-design to take care of their own customized needs going forward. Especially those enterprises that deal in strategic sectors...so fully expect Godrej to follow suit at some point (unless they're already doing it?).
L&T's chip design division comes to the fore as the Govt takes steps to push Chinese CCTV makers out of the market:
News is focused on which camera brand replaces Hikvision.
The more interesting story is who makes the chip inside the camera.
Until 2019, that answer was overwhelmingly HiSilicon, Huawei's semiconductor arm that dominated surveillance SoCs globally. US sanctions killed that supply chain overnight and the entire industry moved to Ambarella, Novatek, and Sigmastar. India's CCTV ban accelerates the same logic one layer deeper. Not just who assembles the camera, but who designs the silicon.
And that story is already further along than most people realize.
L&T Semiconductor Technologies has signed a deal with CP Plus to supply indigenously designed Vision SoCs for 9 million IP cameras over three years. These aren't concept chips. They support 8MP imaging and this is the first time surveillance cameras will be made using chips from an Indian company. CP Plus is the largest domestic brand by market share, so this isn't a token pilot.
Beyond L&T Semi, there are at least four more startups building surveillance SoCs under the government's Design Linked Incentive scheme.
Mindgrove Technologies has the V2600, a surveillance-grade edge AI chip targeting late 2026 commercial launch. BigEndian Semiconductors raised $3M from Vertex Ventures and partnered with Cadence on Project VASU, a secure-boot SoC with encryption baked into the silicon. 3rdiTech and Netrasemi round out the group. Collectively these four have raised over ₹300 crore and taped out test chips in 2025.
Two years ago none of this existed. Now you have five separate Indian chip efforts targeting the same market, with the largest one already locked into a volume manufacturing agreement. India did the same thing in telecom: kicked out Huawei, filled the gap with allied vendors, then started building its own stack with Tejas Networks.
Surveillance silicon is following the same script, and hopefully moving faster.