By Suresh Babu Katta, Co-Founder & CEO of Mukula Technologies Private Limited
This month, as India reflects on the contributions of its engineers, it is worth pausing on one word: evolution. For the past three decades, India’s engineering story has been enormous, spanning software, systems, and infrastructure that today power much of the world. While this legacy is real and continues to grow, I believe the next chapter will be different in kind, not just in scale. India’s next engineering revolution will be designed in silicon.
Software engineering, for all its complexity, operates in a forgiving medium. Code can be deployed, tested, patched, and redeployed within hours. Chip design offers no such luxury. A silicon wafer moves through hundreds of precise steps, each demanding control over temperature, chemistry, and timing measured in fractions that leave almost no room for error. Once a design is committed to silicon and manufactured, mistakes are enormously expensive to fix. This is engineering in its most unforgiving form, and it is precisely the kind of discipline India’s engineering talent is now beginning to embrace at scale.
Consider what happens inside a single wafer. It does not become one chip, it can become hundreds or thousands of them, depending on how the design is architected. The economics that follow, wafer volume, chip size, yield, and selling price, are unforgiving in their own way. A single percentage point of yield improvement, achieved through better design and process engineering, can determine whether a product is commercially viable at all. This is a different kind of engineering fluency than most Indian engineers have historically been trained for, and building it is now one of the country’s most important tasks.
This shift also demands a different kind of engineering partnership. Chip design does not happen in isolation. Fabless design companies, foundries, and packaging and testing partners must work in close coordination, often years in advance of a product reaching the market. An engineer working in this world is not just solving an isolated technical problem; they are contributing to a long chain of dependencies where every design decision echoes downstream, through manufacturing, yield, cost, and ultimately, whether a chip ships at all. This systems-level thinking, engineering with awareness of the entire value chain, is a muscle India is only beginning to build, and it will define the next generation of engineering leadership.
What makes this moment particularly significant is scale. India does not need one flagship chip company to succeed at this. It needs hundreds of engineering teams, working across fabless design, verification, packaging, and testing, each contributing to a domestic semiconductor ecosystem that is greater than the sum of its parts. Some of these teams may design specialised chips for security, payments, or connectivity, produced in the millions and embedded quietly into everyday products. Individually modest, collectively transformative, this is how engineering ecosystems are actually built.
India’s engineers, across software, systems, and manufacturing, have built strong capabilities and established the country’s engineering talent on a global stage. That foundation remains an important asset as India expands its engineering capabilities into semiconductors and other areas of physical technology, including silicon design and manufacturing.
The next chapter in this engineering journey will increasingly extend beyond software into the physical world, with silicon playing an important role in that evolution. It will be built steadily, one design, one team, and one silicon wafer at a time.