The engineering firms that turn a specification into a tapeout.
India’s established strength in the semiconductor chain. Design services are people-intensive rather than capital-intensive, which is why they arrived here decades before fabrication did.
Firms that take a customer specification all the way to working packaged silicon, absorbing tool licences, IP procurement and foundry interface along the way.
Contracted verification engineering. The largest single category of semiconductor work done in India by headcount, and the usual first hire for a new design team.
Floorplanning, placement, routing and timing closure delivered as a service. The most tool-dependent and most schedule-critical part of the design flow.
Bringing first silicon up on a bench, characterising it against specification, and writing the test programs the assembly line will later run in volume.
Contract engineering that makes a chip testable: inserting scan chains, compressing patterns and driving coverage up before the design is frozen.
Designing the substrate, the routing and the power delivery around a die, and proving by simulation that the package will not degrade the signals passing through it.
Building and validating the process design kits that let designers target a fab at all: the models, rule decks and libraries that describe what the process can do.
Turning a finished layout into the data a mask writer can use, correcting for the optical distortions of the exposure and fracturing the result into writeable shapes.