Silicon shipped in billions of units,
and a founding bench still being built

Siju Kurian

Founder, Managing Director and Chief Executive

Twenty-four years in wireless silicon. He joined Atheros in 2002 and stayed through its acquisition by Qualcomm, ending as Senior Director of Engineering at Qualcomm India and hardware lead for the Wi-Fi 8 access-point programme.

He built the Chennai team from nothing to more than 150 engineers, and the organisation to over 200 across Chennai and Bangalore. Most of his direct reports stayed with him for more than fifteen years — on a founding team, that record matters more than the headcount.

He was among those who moved first-generation silicon development from the United States to India, rather than the maintenance work that usually lands here. Chips built under that shift ship in billions of units. That argument — that the hard, original part of the work can be done in India — is the company.

End-to-end delivery across architecture, RTL, verification and tape-out. M.Tech, IIT Madras; AIR 32 in GATE 2000.

Two people who have done this before

Thomas Varghese RF, wireless and mixed-signal

Silicon shipped at scale into leading first-generation smartphones. He has built, grown and run multiple organisations from the ground up — Hmicro India, C Mobile and AthenaSemi — and led the silicon and signal-processing development behind disposable biosensors through to commercialisation in India, which is a harder thing than a demo.

Earlier: scientist at DRDO, the Indian Railway Service, Wipro and Broadcom. B.Tech, Kerala University; M.Tech, IIT Delhi. LinkedIn

Lijoshmohan NK Design-for-test and tape-out delivery

Twenty-seven years in semiconductors: design-for-test architecture, silicon validation, manufacturing test and complex ASIC and SoC delivery at advanced process nodes — engineering roles across Intel, Renesas, Achronix, STMicroelectronics, TDK InvenSense, EM Microelectronic and Microchip.

Founder of QSilicon Consulting, later integrated into Drutaya Semi, with multiple silicon tape-outs delivered. He is also an active builder of the Kochi semiconductor ecosystem. Post-graduate in Electronics, CUSAT, Kochi. LinkedIn

We will name them here as they start

Senior engineers are engaged across software and root of trust, FPGA and silicon bring-up, and firmware — some full-time, some on a consulting basis while they work out notice periods, and some with start dates ahead of them. We will name each of them here once they have actually started, which is why the roles table still shows those seats as open. The first graduate engineers join through campus hiring in Kerala.