Aheesa Digital Innovations, a Chennai fabless semiconductor startup, is designing the kind of silicon India has long imported without a second thought: the networking chip inside the routers and fibre-broadband terminals that bring the internet into homes and offices. Its flagship, VIHAAN-I, is a RISC-V networking SoC that the company describes on its official site as India’s first domestically designed broadband networking SoC — designed and developed in India under the Ministry of Electronics & IT’s Design-Linked Incentive (DLI) scheme, and built for enterprise, telecom, AI-edge and automotive applications.
The chip that worked the first time
The engineering milestone that matters most here happened between two dates with patriotic symbolism. VIHAAN-I was taped out on Republic Day, 26 January 2026, and the first manufactured lot of silicon came back working on Independence Day, 15 August 2026 — first-pass silicon success, confirmed in an official MeitY release. For a startup’s debut SoC, that is genuinely rare: most chips need at least one respin to fix design bugs found only in real silicon, and skipping that cycle saves months and crores.
The chip was unveiled at SEMICON India 2026 (Yashobhoomi, New Delhi, 17–19 September) in the presence of Union Minister for Electronics & IT Ashwini Vaishnaw, where it was highlighted among Made-in-India chips under Semicon 2.0, per Express Computer.
The technology that matters
VIHAAN-I is a 28nm network SoC built on the open-standard RISC-V architecture — an RV64GC implementation with vector extensions and custom coprocessors for packet processing — powered by the 64-bit C-DAC VEGA processor core. Being RISC-V, the architecture is royalty-free and customizable, which matters for a country trying to build software independence into its hardware.
The chip is purpose-built for fibre-broadband customer premises equipment: it integrates compute, broadband access engines and system control on a single die, with XPON (GPON/EPON) support, 10GBASE-T and Ethernet transceivers, Gigabit Ethernet, DDR4 memory, SPI NOR Flash and eMMC storage, plus a full L2–L7 network protocol stack with hardware-accelerated deep packet inspection and QoS. Security is by design — a hardware root of trust, encryption engines and secure boot. Fabrication was done by UMC, according to the company.
Around the silicon sits an ecosystem meant to shorten the path to products: the Seshnag reference platform and Aheesa Router OS (AROS), an OpenWRT-based software stack with U-Boot, boot loaders and drivers, so that OEMs and ODMs can build routers and broadband terminals on VIHAAN-I without starting from scratch.
The road so far
Aheesa was founded in 2021 by Sridharan Mani (founder and CEO) with industry veterans, and was approved under MeitY’s DLI scheme in 2023. Earlier in 2026, the company raised around ₹40 crore from the Tamil Nadu Infrastructure Fund Management Corporation (through the TN Emerging Sector Seed Fund) and private investors, per the MeitY release.
The company is also building the go-to-market around the chip: a packaging and product-development MoU with Optilink Networks, and a nationwide distribution partnership with The Zigma Technologies India, both Chennai firms, signed around August 2026 (per EFY and The Hindu BusinessLine). At the Vetri TN Investment Conclave in August 2026, Aheesa committed ₹250 crore to develop VIHAAN in Tamil Nadu, with about 300 jobs projected — reported by the press, not by the company itself. Production tape-out and commercialisation are targeted for early 2027, according to the company.
Caveats, honestly stated
‘India’s first domestically designed broadband networking SoC’ is the company’s own framing, repeated by press coverage — MeitY’s official release calls it an ‘indigenous broadband networking SoC’, and what is independently confirmed is the working first-pass silicon, which is itself the real achievement. The 28nm process node, UMC fabrication and detailed specifications come from founder interviews, not independent verification. The ₹250 crore commitment is an MoU — intent, not completed investment — and the early-2027 commercialisation target is a target, not a fact. The visuals in this article are the company’s own renders; no public photo of the actual packaged silicon exists yet.
