India's First 12nm AI Chip: Inside Netrasemi's NETRA A2000
For years, the phrase "designed in India" rarely extended to the silicon at the heart of a device.
Union Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw publicly hailed the achievement in late May 2026, pointing to it as proof that the government's design-incentive bets are beginni
The A2000 is what engineers call a System-on-Chip, or SoC — a single piece of silicon that packs many specialized engines onto one die rather than relying on separate components.
Inside, the chip bundles a custom neural processing unit (NPU) for running machine-learning models, vision processing cores (VPU) for interpreting video, an image signal processor