Signing you in

Account subscription benefits alongside Premium Stories, Editorials, Opinions and more. Unlock these with Subscription

The View From India Looking at World Affairs from the Indian perspective.

First Day First Show News and reviews from the world of cinema and streaming.

Today's Cache Your download of the top 5 technology stories of the day.

Data Point Decoding the headlines with facts, figures, and numbers

Health Matters Ramya Kannan writes to you on getting to good health, and staying there

The Hindu On Books Books of the week, reviews, excerpts, new titles and features.

Jyothis Indirabhai, co-founder CEO of Netrasemi, with the company’s newly launched A2000 AI chip. | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

Thiruvananthapuram-based semiconductor start-up Netrasemi has announced the launch of its flagship AI system-on-chip (SoC), A2000. The company said the chip has successfully completed silicon bring-up, a critical stage of laboratory testing, and is being readied for commercial production at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in Taiwan next year.

Founded in 2020, Netrasemi is a ‘fabless’ company that designs and sells semiconductor chips while outsourcing their manufacturing to specialised facilities.

The A2000 AI chip targets applications such as smart surveillance cameras, edge AI boxes and intelligent video gateways. The company said on Friday (May 29, 2026) that the chip will enter volume production in 2027 and is expected to help global platform developers bring advanced AI algorithms to small edge devices.

A2000 is one of India’s first AI/ML chips and 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 incorporates the company’s patented heterogeneous graph-stream parallel processing architecture. The chip design will be shared with select OEMs for joint R&D aimed at developing further commercial use cases.

“Our SoCs go beyond conventional AI/ML integration by combining proprietary hardware acceleration IPs with domain-specific optimisations tailored for high-performance, real-time edge AI. The architecture is specifically designed for compact, power- and cost-sensitive edge devices. We are currently working with several leading OEMs to facilitate early sample evaluations, co-development and advanced R&D initiatives,” said Jyothis Indirabhai, co-founder CEO, Netrasemi, said.

Asked about the relevance of the launch to Kerala’s start-up ecosystem, Mr. Indirabhai termed it “an opportunity to promote indigenous product manufacturing”.

“It is extremely important that Indian companies manufacturing products such as cameras, robots and low-cost IoT devices get early access to intelligent and cost-effective chips so they can develop their products faster. India’s ecosystem is more suited for product development; however, start-ups and governments often focus on the services sector,” he said.

Mr. Indirabhai also urged Kerala-based start-ups to collaborate with Netrasemi.

Netrasemi, in collaboration with the College of Engineering, Trivandrum (CET), has developed another SoC chip, the R1000 AI/ML MCU, for the IoT sensor market with support from MeitY’s Chip-to-Startup (C2S) programme. The company is also developing an advanced edge AI server chip, A4000, with MeitY support, which is expected to be fabrication-ready by the second quarter of 2027, it said.

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.