iVP Semiconductor is positioned to be India’s first fabless chip company which designs semiconductor chips as products and owns the intellectual property, though the manufacture, assembly, testing, and packaging (ATMP) of the chips will be outsourced. The start-up is targeting the opportunities in the power sector, and make semiconductor chips for electronics in solar inverters, smart grids, and two-wheeler batteries.

The Indian chip company aims to achieve annual revenues of at least USD 70 million in three to four years. The company has secured USD five million in pre-series A funding.  iVP Semi, following an 'asset-lite' model, would only have the design and testing part of ATMP, all other elements of the value chain would be outsourced. For testing, the company is in talks with the Tamil Nadu government to set up ‘common test facilities’ which many companies could use.

Emerging areas driving the demand for chips, include energy meters, smart cards, BLDC motors, controllers and battery management systems in electric vehicles and point-of-sales devices. 

The semiconductor industry is broadly divided into three parts - design for creating electronic circuits, manufacture, fabrication in a foundry, where the circuits are etched on a silicon wafer and ‘assembly, testing, marking and packaging’ (ATMP). In ATMP, companies like Micron and CG Semi have come up to build facilities.