SEMICON India 2026 concludes with 15 announcements, headlined by Indian startups and student teams

New Delhi's Yashobhoomi convention centre wrapped up SEMICON India 2026 on September 19, 2026 with a concluding session that packed in 15 announcements, ranging from indigenous processor challenges to sovereign computing partnerships and skilling tie-ups, according to a press release from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

The day put the spotlight on Indian startups and student teams building on homegrown chip platforms, alongside a new industry report projecting sharp growth for the country's semiconductor market.

SEMICON India 2026, the fifth edition of the event, ran from September 17 to 19 and was jointly organised by the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) and SEMI on the theme 'Silicon to Systems: Building the Ecosystem'.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the conference on its opening day. The event has grown into one of the country's largest semiconductor gatherings, bringing together government bodies, global chipmakers, academic institutions and start-ups as India works to build out design, manufacturing and packaging capabilities under its broader Semicon India programme.

Student teams turn indigenous chips into real products

The clearest entrepreneurial story from the closing session came from the Digital India RISC-V (DIR-V) Grand Challenge, organised by Maker Village under the Chips to Startup Programme of MeitY. The contest drew 1,236 teams comprising 5,045 participants, and three winning teams shared a total prize purse of Rs 60 lakh.

Meevisai Technologies, representing a SASTRA University team, took the first prize for an autonomous water-surface cleaning robot built on the indigenous SHAKTI processor developed by IIT Madras, aimed at cleaning ponds and temple tanks. Digiscope LLP won the second prize for VEGA Chikitsa, a digital stethoscope that captures heart and lung sounds with real-time filtering and machine-learning-assisted murmur screening, built on CDAC's VEGA processor. Zetawave Technologies, an IISc Bengaluru team, took the third prize for a forest-environment monitoring system, also on the VEGA platform.

Startups get investor time, and the market outlook brightens

Startup engagement ran through several other parts of the day. Under Startup Mitra, 11 startups pitched to more than 20 venture capital investors, with Elphins Technologies placing first, Meukron Technologies second, and Multi Nano Sense Technologies and CraftifAI sharing third place. A parallel SEMICON India Hackathon drew 3,808 team registrations from 881 colleges and 1,053 ideas, with 10 teams reaching the grand finale; teams from VIT Vellore and IIT Madras emerged as winners.

Adding context to the day's numbers, EY and the India Semiconductor and Electronics Association launched a report titled 'Semicon India 2.0: From Capacity Creation to Ecosystem Leadership'. The report estimates that India's semiconductor market could grow from nearly $64 billion in 2026 to $200 billion by 2035, and it lays out a roadmap for converting domestic demand and design talent into leadership across manufacturing, advanced packaging and innovation, reports suggest. Beyond the startup track, the session also saw C-DAC launch PARAM Vidya, a plug-and-play AI lab-in-a-box for universities and MSMEs, and PARAM Shavak-QS, a compact quantum simulation platform, alongside partnerships between C-DAC and NLC India, and C-DAC and Bharat Electronics Limited, for sovereign data-centre and computing infrastructure.

What is RISC-V and why India is betting on it

RISC-V is an open, royalty-free processor architecture, meaning any company or research group can design chips on it without paying licensing fees to a proprietary chip-design firm. For India, which has historically depended on foreign architectures for processor design, this matters because it lowers the barrier for home-grown players to build their own chips from the ground up.

That is why platforms like SHAKTI, developed at IIT Madras, and VEGA, developed by CDAC, carry weight beyond the prize money at events such as the DIR-V Grand Challenge. Each winning product built on these processors becomes a small proof point that Indian teams can design and deploy usable hardware on domestically developed silicon, rather than only assembling around imported chips.

Taken together, the concluding session's announcements, layered on top of 41 MoUs and initiatives unveiled during the first two days, point to an event that MeitY is positioning as a bridge between policy intent and on-ground execution. With the EY-ISEA report setting a 2035 horizon for India's semiconductor ambitions, the next test will be whether winning startups such as Meevisai and Digiscope, and the skilling partnerships announced alongside them, can scale from hackathon prototypes and MoUs into deployable products and a trained workforce over the coming years.