India is at the cutting edge of chip design. But how Indian is it?

On 16 September, British semiconductor design firm ARM opened a new engineering office in Bengaluru, where it will design 2-nanometre semiconductor chips. A day later, Japanese chip design firm Renesas Electronics said it is in the process of validating 3nm chips that it has been designing in India since May. But while Indian engineers are at the forefront of this work, a crucial question remains: who owns the patents? The answer is not straightforward, and it highlights a key issue for India—the distinction between…