A Big Move For India In Semiconductor Industry

V. Kamakoti, Director of IIT Madras, claims that the performance of India’s Shakti and Vega microprocessors, created by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), is comparable to that of its counterparts worldwide.

With the government continuing to support the industry with numerous incentives and subsidies, the processors mark a significant achievement in the nation’s IT objectives. Benchmarks such as CoreMark indicate that the processors are on par with or better than modern microprocessors; these benchmarks, however, vary depending on the particular silicon and Process Development Kit (PDK) utilised.

The group worked on several unfunded projects from 2013 to 2017, most of which were overseen by students. They were convinced that the RISC-V architecture had great potential and made a commitment to it.

They were given an initial funding of about one million dollars before the end of 2017, and that money was used to design and construct three chips. These C and E class CPUs were successfully constructed, tested, and they ran multiple software applications, including Linux.

After this achievement, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Swadeshi Microprocessor Challenge were formed. More than 10,000 people took up the challenge, resulting in about 500 teams that were ultimately selected for the final shortlist. The programme sparked a variety of publications in a variety of subjects.