InCore Semiconductors

InCore is a fabless semiconductor startup that focuses on building RISC-V-based processor solutions for industries, including industrial automation and consumer electronics. InCore offers fully customizable RISC-V cores and reference SoCs, to create high-performance, low-power, and cost-effective solutions for a variety of embedded applications.

The founding team at InCore was previously responsible for the creation of Shakti – India’s first indigenously designed microprocessor, at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras’ RISE lab.

RISC-V, which stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer, is an instruction set architecture (ISA), meaning it helps determine how a CPU is controlled by software. RISC-V has seen strong demand in the development of custom processors since it is an open standard and royalty-free.

The global semiconductor industry, which is crucial to the development of many other industries, including healthcare, communications, and transportation, is expected to become a trillion-dollar industry by 2030.

India currently imports close to 80% of its semiconductor requirements. To safeguard against chip shortages, it’s crucial for the country to develop its chip processing capabilities and become self-reliant. That said, creating configurable and scalable tools that can make the best of RISC-V’s open-source capabilities is an uphill task. InCore simplifies this task with minimal human intervention.

The company’s Core-Hub generators, which are software tools that generate hardware designs, facilitate the creation of RISC-V-compatible solutions that can be tailored to the needs of different applications. The company’s solutions extend to providing support for full chip turnkey designs, including software development kits and application support. The startup also assists in the manufacturing of these chips with help from its partners.

InCore was founded in Chennai in May 2018 by Arjun Menon, Gautam Doshi, GS Madhusudan, and Neel Gala. Madhusudan, Neel and Arjun played a crucial role in the founding team of Project Shakti at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras. Based on RISC-V architecture, Shakti is among India’s first industrial-grade microprocessor projects. Before InCore, Gautam spent decades at Intel as a distinguished engineer.