Source: ETTelecom, reporting on the ETElectronicsWorld Design & Verification Summit 2026 in Bengaluru, featuring insights from Ajay Krishnan, Senior Director of Product Management at the Karnataka Digital Economy Mission (KDEM).
The global semiconductor industry is facing a critical and escalating bottleneck: design verification. As the demand for advanced chips to power 5G, AI, edge computing, and next-generation telecom networks skyrockets, the traditional verification process is becoming unsustainable, consuming up to 70% of the chip development cycle. At the ETElectronicsWorld Design & Verification Summit in Bengaluru, Ajay Krishnan of the Karnataka Digital Economy Mission (KDEM) delivered a stark assessment, framing verification as the “real bottleneck” and issuing a strategic imperative for India’s tech ambitions: the nation must accelerate the development of its own semiconductor intellectual property (IP). This call to action is not merely about technological sovereignty; it is a direct requirement for the future resilience and competitiveness of India’s and the world’s telecommunications infrastructure. Without mastering verification and cultivating a robust domestic IP portfolio, India risks remaining a high-skilled outsourcer while global rivals like the US, Taiwan, and China consolidate control over the foundational technologies that will define the next decade of connectivity.
The Verification Bottleneck: A Technical and Economic Imperative
The verification process in semiconductor design is a monumental task of ensuring that a chip’s billions of transistors will function as intended before committing to a multi-million dollar fabrication run. With each new process node—from 7nm to 5nm, 3nm, and beyond—design complexity grows exponentially. Krishnan highlighted that verification now dominates the project timeline, a trend that threatens to stall innovation and increase costs for end products, including network switches, baseband processors, optical transceivers, and radio units.
The core of the challenge lies in the sheer scale. A modern system-on-chip (SoC) for a 5G radio unit or core network appliance integrates multiple processor cores, specialized accelerators for signal processing, high-speed SerDes for optical interfaces, and complex memory hierarchies. Verifying this ensemble requires simulating trillions of cycles across countless potential scenarios. Traditional methods are hitting physical limits in compute time and engineering resources. This bottleneck has direct consequences for telecom operators and equipment vendors: delayed time-to-market for new network gear, increased R&D costs that are passed down the supply chain, and heightened risk of post-deployment bugs that can cripple network reliability.
Krishnan pointed to the emergence of AI and machine learning as potential game-changers. AI-driven verification tools can prioritize test scenarios, predict failure points, and automate mundane tasks, potentially slashing verification time by significant margins. However, he cautioned that these tools themselves are complex and require deep, specialized expertise to develop and deploy effectively—expertise that is currently concentrated in a handful of global EDA (Electronic Design Automation) giants like Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens EDA.
Building Domestic IP: A Strategic Shift for India’s Telecom Ecosystem
Krishnan’s argument extends beyond solving verification; it is a strategic blueprint for India’s role in the global tech supply chain. For decades, India has excelled as a global hub for chip design services, with engineers contributing to flagship products for companies like Qualcomm, Intel, and NVIDIA. However, this model, while valuable, leaves the nation dependent on foreign-owned IP. The value capture—and strategic control—resides elsewhere.
KDEM’s push is for India to transition from a service provider to an IP creator. This involves focusing on developing core semiconductor IP blocks—such as processor cores, interface protocols (PCIe, CXL), memory controllers, and security modules—that are critical for telecom infrastructure. The goal is to create a library of “India-designed, India-owned” IP that can be licensed to both domestic and international fabless companies and integrated device manufacturers (IDMs).
For the telecom sector, this has profound implications:
- Supply Chain Security: Domestic IP reduces reliance on foreign technology, a critical consideration for national security and the resilience of communications networks.
- Cost Optimization: Local IP can lower licensing fees for Indian equipment makers like Sterlite, Tejas Networks, or emerging players, making their switches, routers, and OLTs more competitive.
- Innovation Tailoring: India can develop IP optimized for local use cases, such as low-power chips for rural network deployments, cost-effective processors for mass-market CPE (Customer Premises Equipment), or specialized silicon for India’s specific spectrum bands and network architectures.
The Karnataka government, through KDEM, is actively creating an ecosystem to support this shift. This includes proposed investments in “Semiconductor Common Design Facilities”—shared labs with state-of-the-art EDA tools and prototyping capabilities accessible to startups and academia—and fostering stronger collaboration between industry, research institutions like the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), and global partners.
Global and Regional Implications for Telecom Infrastructure
India’s push into semiconductor IP creation does not occur in a vacuum. It is a direct response to global supply chain shocks and the strategic tech competition between the US and China. For telecom operators and infrastructure providers worldwide, a more diversified semiconductor IP landscape is ultimately beneficial, reducing concentration risk.
However, the path is fraught with challenges. The semiconductor IP market is entrenched, with ARM holding a dominant position in CPU architectures, and Synopsys and Cadence leading in interface and foundation IP. Breaking in requires not just technical excellence but also building trust in the reliability and long-term support of the IP—a non-negotiable requirement for telecom-grade equipment with 99.999% uptime expectations.
Regionally, success in India could inspire similar initiatives in other parts of the Global South. For the African and MENA telecom markets, which are also heavily dependent on imported network technology, the emergence of a cost-competitive, alternative source of semiconductor IP could, in the long term, lower barriers to entry for local equipment assembly and foster innovation tailored to regional needs, such as solar-powered base station controllers or heat-tolerant chips.
The Road Ahead: Verification, IP, and the Future of Telecom Hardware
The insights from Bengaluru underscore a fundamental shift. The future of telecom infrastructure—from Open RAN radios to AI-powered core networks and satellite ground terminals—will be dictated by the availability of advanced, reliable, and secure semiconductors. Overcoming the verification bottleneck is the immediate technical hurdle; building a sovereign IP portfolio is the long-term strategic imperative.
For telecom stakeholders, this means several forward-looking considerations:
- Vendor Strategy: Operators and integrators should monitor the progress of Indian semiconductor IP firms. Future procurement decisions for network hardware could involve evaluating the provenance and resilience of the underlying silicon.
- Investment Focus: Infrastructure investors and private equity in the telecom space should view advanced semiconductor design and verification capabilities as critical enabling technologies, potentially worthy of strategic investment alongside fiber and towers.
- Policy Engagement: Industry bodies should engage with initiatives like KDEM to ensure that the developed IP aligns with the real-world requirements of modern, software-defined, and cloud-native networks.
India’s ambition to become a semiconductor IP powerhouse is a multi-year journey. Its success or failure will significantly influence the cost, innovation pace, and geopolitical landscape of the global telecom equipment market for decades to come. The call from KDEM is clear: mastering verification and owning the IP is no longer optional for a nation that aspires to be a technology leader; it is the foundational layer upon which future digital sovereignty and network resilience will be built.
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