Silicon designed by the operator of 810,000+ street lights.
Citichip is a low-power IoT system-on-chip built for the one thing general-purpose silicon has never been designed for: years of unattended, metered, secure operation on a pole.
CITiLIGHT has automated 810,000+ street lights across 140+ cities. We design and build every controller that goes on those poles — seven types, from NEMA and Zhaga nodes to CCMS panels and high-mast units — at our own 40,000 sq ft facility in Bawal.
Every one of them runs on imported, general-purpose silicon. It was designed for consumer devices and industrial boards, not for a lamp post. It doesn't meter at utility grade. It doesn't resist tampering. It isn't built to run unattended for a decade at 50°C.
A decade of deploying, maintaining and replacing controllers taught us exactly what the silicon inside them needs to do. Nobody makes that chip. So we're making it.
“Systems to silicon. We're arriving at it from the other direction.”
CITiLIGHT ILC module — designed in-house, Gurugram
A low-power IoT SoC on a 22 nm process, available in four variants, designed so a single device can meter, secure, connect and control a luminaire without a board full of parts around it.
Specifications are design targets and subject to change before production silicon.
810,000+ street lights, on poles already in the ground.
Utility-grade metrology
24-bit sigma-delta ADC for billing-accurate energy measurement at the pole — the data cities are charged on.
Hardware security
AES encryption, true random number generation, and physical tamper detection built into the silicon, not bolted on.
Connectivity
NB-IoT and LTE Cat-1bis for wide-area cellular; BLE and Sub-GHz for local and mesh. One chip, every network a city runs.
Built for the pole
Ultra-low-power operation, wide temperature range, and a decade-long service life as design targets, not afterthoughts.
Most chip companies spend years looking for their first design win. Ours is already on the poles. Every new CITiLIGHT controller will ship on Citichip, and the controllers already in the field tell us, in real time, what the silicon has to get right.
Field footage · CITiLIGHT deployment
Where we are.
2026 — Architecture (NOW)
Specification complete. IP selection and process node locked. Programme presented at SEMICON India.
2027 — First silicon
Design, integration and verification. First tapeout.
2028 — Production
Validation on CITiLIGHT controllers in the field. Production tapeout.
2029 — In the fleet
Citichip in every new CITiLIGHT controller, and available to partners.
The LoRaWAN industry already knows the name.
Semtech partner
CITiLIGHT's NEMA node on Semtech's partner wall. Our LoRaWAN deployments are the subject of a Semtech case study.
Wall of Fame of LoRaWAN devices
The CITiLIGHT integrated node, on the wall at The Things Conference, Amsterdam.
Juniper Awards, London
First prize, Smart City Innovation.
Investors
Citichip is a semiconductor programme with its first customer already on the poles. If you invest in Indian deep tech or infrastructure, we'd like to walk you through it. Deck shared under NDA.
OEM and device partners
Signify, Havells and Bajaj already ship CITiLIGHT nodes inside their luminaires. If you make outdoor lighting or metered infrastructure, the next generation will be on our own silicon.
Join the team
We're hiring senior chip design, verification and physical design engineers in Bengaluru and Gurugram. If you've taped out before and want to build silicon with a customer waiting for it, we'd like to hear from you.