India’s design-linked incentive (DLI) scheme is showing good results, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has said, hailing the country’s first flagship AI system on chip (SOC) 'A2000' at 12nm technology node designed by Thiruvananthapuram-based fabless semiconductor startup Netrasemi.

The chip has now achieves successful silicon Bringup and getting ready for commercial production.

“Netrasemi has designed India’s first Edge AI System-on-Chip (SoC) ‘NETRA A2000’, at advanced 12 nm node. At commercial scale, this will power smart vision devices for surveillance, automotive, robotics, drones, etc,” the minister posted on X.

The chip with smart vision and real-time video analytics capabilities enables on-device AI for smart cameras and Edge AI platforms.

The chip, fabricated at TSMC's 12nm advanced process node, targets high-TOPS AI performance, computer vision, Video streaming, secure boot and significant IO capabilities.

It features Netrasemi's in-house Neural processor (NPU), Vision cores (VPU), Image Signal Processor(ISP), Crypto-Engines and other hardware acceleration IP cores.

It also features their patented Heterogeneous graph-stream parallel processing architecture.

The chip design will be shared with select OEMs for joint R&D to develop further commercial use cases. The chip commercial production is likely to begin next year at TSMC, Taiwan, according to the startup.

“Our SoCs goes beyond conventional AI/ML integration by combining proprietary hardware acceleration IPs with domain-specific optimisations tailored for high-performance, real-time edge AI,” said Jyothis Indirabhai, Co-founder and CEO, Netrasemi.

“We are currently working with several leading OEMs to facilitate early sample evaluations, co-development, and advanced R&D initiatives,” said Indirabhai.

The semiconductor design-linked incentive (DLI) and design infrastructure support (DIS) schemes have played a key role in achieving this critical milestone.

The company was one of the first four startups selected for Rs 15 crore DLI support in 2023 by MeitY. Netrasemi has raised Rs 125 crore in total funding to date.