India is building the foundations of a semiconductor industry. It is developing RISC-V capabilities, investing in electronics manufacturing and creating a growing deep-tech ecosystem. But a chip does not become a product simply because it comes out of a fab. Between silicon and the finished product lies an enormous layer of software, tools, drivers, APIs, standards and engineering knowledge. India should start building that layer now.
The Semiconductor Clock Is Not the Only Clock That Matters
India's semiconductor story is beginning to move from policy announcements toward physical infrastructure.
The Tata Electronics semiconductor fab in Gujarat, being established in partnership with Taiwan's Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (PSMC), has an approved investment of ₹91,526 crore and planned production capacity of approximately 50,000 wafer starts per month. India's semiconductor programme is also supporting OSAT facilities and a growing semiconductor-design ecosystem.
But there is another clock running in parallel.
The software clock.
A semiconductor fab can eventually produce chips. A design company can eventually produce a RISC-V processor. An NPU company can eventually produce an accelerator.
But when those chips arrive, someone has to make them useful.
Someone needs to make them boot.
Someone needs to write the drivers.
Someone needs to make Linux or an RTOS understand the hardware.
Someone needs to make the compiler generate good code.
Someone needs to make the GPU work.
Someone needs to make the NPU accessible to AI frameworks.
Someone needs to make cameras, displays, storage, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB, sensors and power management work.
Someone needs to build the SDK.
Someone needs to test it.
Someone needs to document it.
Someone needs to maintain it five years later.
The time to begin doing that work is before the hardware arrives.
India should not wait for its semiconductor ecosystem to become mature before building the software ecosystem that makes that semiconductor ecosystem useful.
It should build the software ecosystem while the hardware ecosystem is still learning.
The Missing Institution
India already has companies, universities, semiconductor programmes, startups, open-source developers and individual RISC-V initiatives.
What is missing is a large institution whose primary purpose is to connect these efforts at the common infrastructure layer.
Call it, for now, the Indian Open Technology Consortium.
The name is less important than the function.
Its mission should be simple:
Build and maintain the open software, APIs, tools, reference implementations, testing infrastructure and standards required to make modern hardware easy to develop products on.
There is an important distinction in that sentence.
The consortium should not primarily make end-user products.
It should make the tools used to make end-user products.
Build the Plinth, Not Every Statue
Imagine a giant statue.
The statue is what everyone notices. It is the smartphone, automobile, robot, television, refrigerator, industrial machine or computer.
But underneath the statue is the plinth.
The plinth doesn't determine what the statue looks like. It gives the statue a stable foundation.
This is the role the consortium should play.
It should build the plinth.
A smartphone company can build its smartphone.
An automobile company can build its vehicle.
An appliance company can build its refrigerator.
A robotics startup can build its robot.
A semiconductor company can build its processor.
The consortium should make it easier for all of them to build.
That means standardising and maintaining the common layers that do not need to be reinvented by every company.
What Is the Common Layer?
Consider a smart washing machine.
The manufacturer may have proprietary algorithms for determining washing cycles, water consumption, detergent use, vibration and load characteristics.
Those are legitimate areas of differentiation.
But the machine also needs:
- sensor interfaces
- motor interfaces
- networking
- security
- firmware updates
- diagnostics
- power management
- storage
- Bluetooth or Wi-Fi
- device management
Why should every washing-machine company independently reinvent all of that?
Now consider a smart TV.
It needs:
- GPU support
- video decoding
- audio
- display drivers
- HDMI
- USB
- networking
- storage
- security
- OTA updates
Again, much of this is plumbing.
The same pattern appears in cars, smart watches, robot vacuums, industrial IoT devices, cameras, medical devices and smartphones.
The opportunity is to make the plumbing reusable.
Standardise the Interface, Not the Innovation
This is perhaps the most important design principle for the consortium.
It should not attempt to standardise the product.
It should standardise the interfaces between the components.
Imagine three different NPU manufacturers.
They have completely different internal architectures.
That is fine.
The application should be able to communicate with them through a common software interface.
AI APPLICATION
|
Common NPU API
|
AI Runtime
|
+---------------+---------------+
| | |
NPU A NPU B NPU C
| | |
Vendor A Vendor B Vendor C
The same principle can apply to GPUs, cameras, displays, sensors, audio systems, storage, security engines and other hardware.
The consortium's job is not to tell semiconductor companies how to design their chips.
Its job is to ensure that software developers have a predictable way to use those chips.
That is how competition underneath an open interface becomes possible.
RISC-V Makes This Particularly Important
RISC-V is an open standard instruction-set architecture rather than a single processor design. RISC-V International describes its role as maintaining the open standard and related specifications, while implementations and software are developed by the wider ecosystem. The organisation explicitly describes interoperability and shared standards as mechanisms that allow different vendors to compete while building on a common foundation.
That distinction is critical.
RISC-V gives hardware designers freedom.
But freedom at the instruction-set level is only the beginning.
A commercially successful computing ecosystem still needs:
- compilers
- debuggers
- bootloaders
- operating systems
- device drivers
- graphics
- AI runtimes
- multimedia
- security
- networking
- development tools
- documentation
- testing
This is why RISC-V should not be viewed simply as a processor project.
It is an ecosystem project.
Where Should the Consortium Start?
It should not start by designing a new operating system.
It should not start by building a new smartphone.
It should not start by designing another processor.
It should start with something much less glamorous.
Existing hardware.
There are already RISC-V development boards, SoCs, processors and accelerator projects available to developers.
The first task should be to map the ecosystem.
Which boards are available?
Which chips are supported?
Which peripherals work?
Which drivers are missing?
Which Linux subsystems require improvement?
Which RTOS implementations need support?
Where are the documentation gaps?
Which GPUs have usable open drivers?
Which NPUs have usable runtimes?
Which development boards are painful to bring up?
Which interfaces appear repeatedly across different chips?
That produces a list of actual engineering problems.
And those problems become the consortium's first projects.
Start With the Boring 80 Percent
The first engineering teams could concentrate on common interfaces:
- GPIO
- I²C
- SPI
- UART
- PWM
- ADC and DAC
- USB
- Ethernet
- Wi-Fi
- Bluetooth
- SD and eMMC
- NVMe
- display interfaces
- touchscreens
- camera interfaces
- audio
- sensors
- motor controllers
- power-management ICs
- watchdogs
- real-time clocks
- secure elements
- hardware cryptography
These things are not glamorous.
That is precisely why they are valuable.
If five different RISC-V boards require the same kind of support, improving that support once can benefit all five.
If fifty future products can use the same API, the return on that engineering effort becomes enormous.
Then Move Up the Stack
Once the low-level foundation becomes stronger, the consortium can move upward:
LEVEL 1
Drivers / firmware / BSP
|
LEVEL 2
Hardware abstraction
|
LEVEL 3
Common APIs
|
LEVEL 4
SDKs and developer tools
|
LEVEL 5
Reference platforms
|
LEVEL 6
Industry platforms
|
LEVEL 7
Commercial products
The consortium should primarily operate through Levels 1–5.
Industry should dominate Levels 6 and 7.
That boundary is important.
If the consortium begins building commercial end-user products, it starts competing with the very companies it is supposed to enable.
Its purpose is to make those companies stronger.
The Steam Lesson
There is a useful analogy in the gaming world.
Valve's work around Steam on Linux demonstrates what can happen when a company invests heavily in the layers required to make a fragmented technical environment practical for mainstream users.
Proton/Wine, SDL, controller support, graphics compatibility, anti-cheat work, hardware integration and the wider Linux gaming ecosystem did not all originate as a single Valve-owned technology stack.
The important contribution was sustained engineering, integration, investment and upstream collaboration.
Valve didn't need to replace Linux.
It helped make Linux substantially more useful for a particular class of applications.
That is the lesson worth borrowing.
The Indian consortium should not attempt to replace the global open-source ecosystem.
It should make the global open-source ecosystem work exceptionally well with the hardware and industries India is trying to develop.
Do not fork the world. Strengthen the world.
India's First Objective Should Be Hardware Enablement
Imagine an Indian semiconductor company releases a new RISC-V SoC.
Today, the company may have to answer dozens of questions before an OEM can seriously consider it:
- Does Linux boot?
- Are the drivers upstream?
- Does the GPU work?
- Does the NPU have an SDK?
- Can common AI frameworks use it?
- Does video decoding work?
- Does suspend/resume work?
- How good is power management?
- Does Wi-Fi work?
- How do we perform secure OTA updates?
- Where is the documentation?
- Who maintains the software five years from now?
The consortium could turn a large part of that list into a platform service.
The semiconductor company could say:
"This chip is supported by the Open Technology Platform."
That changes the conversation.
The Consortium Becomes a Test Laboratory for Silicon
The organisation could establish shared hardware laboratories.
New chips could be tested against common workloads.
Measurements could include:
- boot time
- power consumption
- thermal behaviour
- memory bandwidth
- GPU performance
- NPU performance
- video playback
- browser performance
- storage
- networking
- sleep and wake
- security
- driver maturity
- application compatibility
This creates an unusually valuable feedback loop.
Software engineers learn what the silicon actually needs.
Silicon engineers learn what real software actually demands.
Future chips can then be designed with that knowledge.
It is a learning machine connecting software and hardware.
The Consortium Should Be Industry-Funded
The most sustainable model is unlikely to be a conventional government software programme.
The government can be an important enabler, but the consortium should ideally have substantial industry funding.
Potential members could include:
- semiconductor companies
- automobile manufacturers
- electronics manufacturers
- appliance manufacturers
- telecommunications companies
- cloud companies
- IT companies
- startups
- universities
- research institutions
- multinational companies with significant engineering operations in India
The government could support the ecosystem through appropriate incentives, research programmes, infrastructure, procurement and university partnerships.
But the foundation should not become a government-owned software company.
A simple division of responsibility would be:
- Government: create favourable conditions.
- Industry: provide funding and engineering participation.
- Universities: provide research and talent.
- Foundation: provide infrastructure and stewardship.
- Engineers: build and maintain the technology.
- Open communities: retain technical authority.
Talent Before Headcount
One of the biggest mistakes would be to define the organisation's success by how many programmers it employs.
FLOSS requires a particular temperament.
Some engineers love the work of maintaining infrastructure for years.
They enjoy debugging obscure problems.
They enjoy reading specifications.
They enjoy reviewing patches.
They are willing to respond to upstream feedback.
They care about documentation and compatibility.
They enjoy understanding systems from silicon to application.
Those people are extraordinarily valuable.
The consortium should find them.
It should not try to force every software engineer into that role.
Start with talent and motivation, not headcount.
Perhaps the first engineering organisation has 100 people.
Perhaps later it becomes 500.
Perhaps eventually it becomes several thousand.
The growth should follow the work.
The Open Technology Academy
There should, however, be a deliberate path for new people to enter this ecosystem.
This is where a training and learning vertical becomes extremely valuable.
But it should not look like a conventional training institute.
It should be an Open Technology Academy.
Its purpose would be to turn interested engineers into contributors, developers, maintainers and eventually systems architects.
And the most important principle should be:
Don't teach people FLOSS. Put them inside FLOSS.
Learning by Contribution
Instead of spending months simply watching courses, an apprentice might receive a RISC-V development board.
The first assignment could be:
Make it boot.
Then:
Find something that doesn't work.
Then:
Debug it.
Then:
Fix it.
Then:
Submit the patch upstream.
Then:
Respond to the review.
Then:
Get it merged.
At that point the person hasn't merely completed a course.
They have become an open-source contributor.
A possible progression could be:
Explorer | Contributor | Developer | Maintainer | Senior Maintainer | Technical Architect
Not everyone needs to reach the top.
Someone may discover that they love documentation.
Another may become an exceptional kernel developer.
Another may specialise in compiler technology.
Another may discover a talent for hardware validation.
Another may become a security engineer.
The Academy should help people discover where they belong.
Talent Should Select Itself
This also solves the problem of identifying people with the necessary drive.
Do not try to identify every future maintainer during recruitment.
Give interested people access to real projects.
Let contribution reveal the talent.
Perhaps 1,000 people enter an introductory programme.
Perhaps 300 become regular contributors.
Perhaps 100 become serious developers.
Perhaps 30 become excellent maintainers.
Perhaps five eventually become world-class subsystem experts.
That is not failure.
That is how a technical culture develops.
AI Makes Systems Engineering More Important
The emergence of increasingly capable AI coding tools makes this model even more interesting.
AI can increasingly help generate code, tests, documentation and debugging hypotheses.
But someone still needs to understand whether the resulting system is correct.
Does the driver break another subsystem?
Does the compiler produce incorrect machine code?
Does the firmware introduce a security vulnerability?
Does the NPU runtime actually exploit the hardware?
Does the power-management implementation work across different boards?
Can the software still be maintained five years later?
These are systems questions.
The consortium should therefore cultivate people who understand the complete chain:
silicon → firmware → kernel → driver → compiler → runtime → application.
That is a particularly valuable form of engineering knowledge.
India Should Not Keep the Consortium Indian
The institution may be founded and substantially funded in India.
But the technology should be globally open.
An engineer in Bengaluru should be able to work with an engineer in Munich.
A university in Chennai should be able to collaborate with a research group in Helsinki.
An Indian startup should be able to work with a European automotive company.
An engineer living in the United States, Japan, Brazil or Africa should be able to contribute to a project simply because they have something valuable to contribute.
Indian-origin engineers around the world could become an important source of talent, mentorship and leadership.
But nationality or ethnicity should not be a requirement for participation.
Indian-founded does not have to mean Indian-only.
Open by Default, Trusted by Design
This global openness must, however, coexist with serious security and compliance practices.
Not every project has the same risk.
A public compiler project and a secure automotive testing laboratory should not necessarily have identical access rules.
The consortium should therefore use a tiered participation model.
Open Community
Anyone can:
- read the code
- use the software
- report bugs
- submit patches
- write documentation
- participate in public projects
Technical Membership
Participating companies, universities and individuals can join working groups and contribute engineering resources under defined governance rules.
Strategic Membership
Trusted organisations can receive access to shared testing infrastructure, pre-production hardware, joint development programmes and industry working groups.
Restricted Projects
Projects involving particularly sensitive semiconductor designs, automotive systems, critical infrastructure, security technology or other controlled technologies can have additional access requirements.
The principle should be:
Open by default. Restricted where justified. Transparent about why.
Trust Should Be an Engineering Requirement
If India wants this consortium to become a major partner for Europe and other advanced technology ecosystems, trust cannot be an afterthought.
The consortium should establish a formal technology-trust framework covering areas such as:
- ownership transparency
- beneficial ownership
- conflict-of-interest rules
- export-control compliance
- research-security procedures
- secure development practices
- software provenance
- dependency tracking
- vulnerability disclosure
- access control
- protection of sensitive hardware
- auditable governance
- transparent funding
The objective should not be to create arbitrary political exclusions.
It should be to create a predictable, auditable system in which partners understand the rules before they participate.
That is particularly important for cooperation with European organisations.
The EU and India are already deepening cooperation in semiconductors, high-performance computing, AI, quantum technologies and 6G through the EU–India Trade and Technology Council. The July 2026 TTC meeting also launched an EU–India deep-tech startup partnership and agreed to strengthen strategic value chains. This creates a natural environment in which a well-governed open technology institution could eventually become a useful India–Europe engineering bridge.
Europe Should Be a Partner, Not Just a Customer
Europe has substantial strengths in automotive systems, industrial automation, robotics, embedded technology, semiconductor equipment, power electronics and industrial software.
India has enormous engineering capacity, a large technology market, a growing semiconductor ecosystem and a large pool of software developers.
An open consortium could sit between these ecosystems.
Indian engineers could contribute maintainers.
European companies could contribute industrial requirements.
Universities could contribute research.
Semiconductor companies could contribute hardware.
Startups could turn the resulting infrastructure into products.
The output would remain open wherever the project licences and governance permit.
A driver written in India could eventually support equipment made in Europe.
A European robotics requirement could lead to an open API maintained by engineers in India.
A RISC-V development tool improved in Bengaluru could be used by developers everywhere.
That is what a genuinely global FLOSS ecosystem looks like.
Become a Serious Upstream Participant
The consortium should also participate deeply in the organisations that already maintain the world's open technology infrastructure.
That could include appropriate membership and engineering participation in organisations and communities around:
- RISC-V
- Linux
- LLVM
- Apache
- Eclipse
- OpenSSF
- Mesa
- Zephyr
- other relevant FLOSS communities
But membership should not be about collecting logos.
Membership should mean contribution.
Money is useful.
Engineers are more useful.
Code is more useful.
Maintainers are more useful.
Testing infrastructure is more useful.
Upstream contributions are more useful.
RISC-V International's current development-partner model is an interesting example of this philosophy: participating organisations commit engineering resources and defined technical deliverables rather than merely being passive members.
India should adopt that mentality broadly.
Don't just join the global commons.
Become one of the people maintaining it.
Four Pillars
The consortium can therefore be organised around four major pillars.
1. Engineering & Maintenance
- Linux
- RISC-V
- firmware
- drivers
- compilers
- graphics
- AI runtimes
- security
- embedded systems
- testing
2. Open Technology Academy
- apprenticeships
- hardware labs
- mentorship
- upstream contribution
- maintainer development
- systems engineering
3. Industry & Ecosystem
- semiconductors
- automotive
- consumer electronics
- appliances
- robotics
- IoT
- industrial systems
- startups
4. Standards & Interoperability
- APIs
- reference architectures
- compatibility specifications
- certification
- hardware profiles
- security requirements
- interoperability testing
These four pillars reinforce one another.
Industry provides real problems.
The engineers solve them.
The Academy creates new engineers.
The standards teams turn repeated solutions into reusable interfaces.
The FLOSS community improves everything.
The Five-Year Flywheel
The initial roadmap could be remarkably simple.
Year 1 — Discover
Inventory existing RISC-V hardware and identify the most common gaps.
Year 2 — Enable
Fix drivers, firmware, toolchains, documentation, testing and hardware support.
Year 3 — Standardise
Turn recurring solutions into common APIs, SDKs and reference platforms.
Year 4 — Industrialise
Build automotive, appliance, robotics, consumer-electronics and IoT working groups.
Year 5 — Export
Turn the Indian engineering base into a global contributor to open technology infrastructure.
The important thing is that the work can begin immediately.
It does not require waiting for a future Indian processor.
And Then the Silicon Arrives
When new Indian semiconductor products eventually become available, they should not enter an empty ecosystem.
They should enter an ecosystem that already knows how to support them.
INDIAN SILICON
|
RISC-V / SoC
|
Common BSP
|
Linux / RTOS
|
Drivers / HAL
|
GPU / NPU / VPU
|
Common APIs
|
SDK
|
Testing / Certification
|
STARTUPS
|
PRODUCTS
|
USERS
This is the entire reason to begin now.
The semiconductor industry has long development cycles.
Software can move faster.
India can use that difference in timescale to its advantage.
Don't Wait for the Perfect Chip
There is a dangerous temptation to say:
"Once India has a world-class processor, then we will build the ecosystem around it."
That is backwards.
The ecosystem should already exist when the processor arrives.
Developers should already know the tools.
Drivers should already have a place to live upstream.
Testing infrastructure should already exist.
SDKs should already be available.
AI frameworks should already have integration pathways.
Companies should already understand how to build products on open hardware.
Universities should already be teaching the relevant skills.
European and other international partners should already know the organisation.
The first commercial Indian chips should therefore become another supported platform rather than an entirely new software emergency.
The Real Product of the Consortium
At first glance, it might seem that the consortium's product is software.
That is only partly true.
Its deeper product is capability.
The capability to take a new processor and make it useful.
The capability to take a new NPU and integrate it with AI frameworks.
The capability to take a new GPU and bring it into the graphics stack.
The capability to take a new sensor and make it available through standard interfaces.
The capability to take a development board and turn it into a product platform.
The capability to train engineers who understand the entire stack.
The capability to maintain software for decades.
The capability to participate in global standards rather than merely consuming them.
That is technological sovereignty in a much more useful sense.
India Does Not Need to Build Everything
There is an important philosophical point here.
Technology sovereignty does not require India to manufacture every component, write every piece of software or create an Indian copy of every global product.
It means developing enough capability that India can understand, integrate, maintain, modify and improve the technologies on which its economy depends.
Open technology is particularly powerful for this purpose.
India can contribute to the global commons while simultaneously developing domestic capability.
A Linux contribution is both global software infrastructure and Indian engineering experience.
A RISC-V toolchain improvement is both global infrastructure and Indian semiconductor enablement.
A new NPU runtime is both a FLOSS contribution and a potential foundation for Indian AI hardware.
A compatibility test suite can be used by Indian manufacturers and foreign manufacturers alike.
Everyone benefits.
The Bigger Vision
Perhaps the most important thing is what this consortium should not become.
It should not become another government IT project.
It should not become a collection of proprietary products.
It should not become an Indian fork of the entire open-source world.
It should not become a jobs programme whose success is measured by headcount.
It should not become a standards bureaucracy detached from real hardware.
It should not build products that compete with the companies it is supposed to enable.
Instead:
Find the talent.
Give them real hardware.
Fix the plumbing.
Upstream the improvements.
Turn repeated solutions into APIs.
Build the tools.
Train through contribution.
Create trusted governance.
Work with Europe and the wider world.
Let startups and manufacturers build the products.
Build the Plinth Before the Statue
India's semiconductor journey will eventually produce silicon.
But silicon alone does not create an ecosystem.
The ecosystem emerges when hardware, software, developers, standards, manufacturers and users can work together.
That requires infrastructure.
Much of that infrastructure can be open.
Much of it can be shared.
Much of it can be built before the final products exist.
And much of it can be built today.
India does not need to wait for the perfect chip.
It can start with the chips and boards already available.
It can start with the missing drivers.
It can start with the broken documentation.
It can start with the APIs nobody has standardised yet.
It can start with the engineers who already have the drive to maintain difficult software.
It can start small and let success attract talent, companies and international partners.
Eventually, Indian-origin engineers around the world can participate.
European companies can become partners.
Universities can become training grounds.
Startups can become users of the infrastructure.
Semiconductor companies can become hardware partners.
And the resulting software can remain part of the global FLOSS commons.
The philosophy can be reduced to five principles:
- Build the tools, not every product.
- Standardise the interfaces, not the innovation.
- Train through contribution, not certificates.
- Be open by default and trusted by design.
- Build in India, contribute to the world.
The semiconductor fab may eventually produce the silicon.
But the software consortium can make sure that when that silicon arrives, someone already knows what to do with it.
That is the real opportunity.
Don't wait for the statue.
Build the plinth.
And make the plinth open enough that the world can build on it.
