He spent a decade at Texas Instruments helping make it the world's number one vendor of DSL modem chips.
Then he quit, put in his own savings, and started a semiconductor company in a garage with one other person. It took eight years before India saw what he had built.
His name is Himamshu Khasnis.
What pushed him out was a number he could not stop thinking about. By his own estimate, close to 45 percent of the world's chips were being designed in Bengaluru. But as he put it, "the intellectual property and the subsequent revenue remained with the USA."
India had more than a billion mobile phones, second only to China, and some of the largest cellular networks on earth. Every silicon chip inside that infrastructure was imported.
He founded Signalchip in 2010.
Chip design is slow, brutally expensive, and offers nothing to show for years. Sridhar Vembu of Zoho, who had started his own career as a wireless engineer at Qualcomm, backed him and stayed. A software founder funding silicon, through a decade with no product.
In 2015 came SCRF1401, India's first RF transceiver chip for 3G, 4G and WiFi.
Then in February 2019, Signalchip unveiled four chips it called the Agumbe family, India's first indigenous semiconductor chips for 4G LTE and 5G NR modems. They cover all LTE and 5G bands up to 6GHz, and they support positioning through NavIC, India's own satellite navigation system.
At the launch, India's Telecom Secretary noted that only around eight companies in the world could design and build chips like these. The team that did it was 40 people.
In October 2024, Khasnis stood at the India Mobile Congress explaining his chips to the Prime Minister, who asked detailed questions.
For years, Indian engineers designed a large share of the world's silicon and owned almost none of it.
Agumbe is Indian at the level that actually matters. The design, the patents, the ownership.
@signalchip