At the Laboratory of VLSI Design, the team is working on the C class of Shakti, which is suited for microcontrollers. Part of what enables a small team to do so is that the processor is based on the RISC-V architecture, an open standard. The entire software toolchain effort is borne by a few universities \u2014 primarily Berkeley, Cambridge, and MIT.<\/p>\n
Neel Gala, a PhD Scholar from IIT Madras, an early member of the Shakti project told us why a small team, that numbers in the tens, can ship a processor, which would otherwise take hundreds of people.<\/p>\n
The RISC-V ISA got traction when the Berkeley team released a processor (in July 2016), which was taped out and running Linux, Gala says. \u201cThis was a team of seven students. A team of just seven people working on a new language, on a new processor, was able to beat ARM or its equivalent. That gave us an extra boost, that we can (do it) as well. There is nothing that is sacred and holy that we don\u2019t know.\u201d ARM is a British chip-maker with a dominant share in processors used in mobile phones and tablets.<\/p>\n
The team uses Bluespec System Verilog, a hardware description programming language used in chip design, which helps in a much shorter product release cycle. \u201cBluespec gives you a high-level abstraction, like going from assembly (level programming) to C. You don\u2019t do the dirty work, the compiler does all the work for you. You work at a much higher level, your throughput increases. Simulation and turnaround time increases, your product release time has a shorter cycle,\u201d Gala says.<\/p>\n
The RISC-V standard offers quality, flexibility and low cost, setting it apart from proprietary ISAs. The RISC-V Foundation, a non-profit corporation, which wants to make the \u2018Linux of microprocessor architectures\u2019, has been getting traction lately. Started in 2014, its membership base has grown to over a hundred organisations, the foundation said in an announcement earlier this week. Apart from the world\u2019s leading tech universities, its members include Google, Huawei, Micron, Microsemi, NVIDIA, NXP, Qualcomm, Samsung, SiFive, among others.<\/p>\n
Referring to a Berkley project where a team of seven researchers taped out a chip equivalent to an ARM processor, PhD scholar Neel Gala says, \u201cThere is nothing that is sacred and holy that we don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There are enthusiastic buglers in this movement of sorts in the microprocessor world. \u201cThe capitalist computing bourgeoisie want to enslave us all with proprietary processing architectures, but the proletariat eventually produces its own processor alternative \u2013 an ISA for and by the people, where instruction sets aren\u2019t subject to the whim of the royalty-driven class, and where licensing fees don\u2019t oppress the workers\u2019 BOMs (bill of materials),\u201d writes Kevin Morris in the Electronics Engineering journal, lending colour and gravitas to what\u2019s at stake in the processor industry.<\/p>\n
Some of that open source zeal can be seen in the Shakti team here. Gala, who was offered a \u2018good seven digit package\u2019 by one of the big chip giants, decided against it. \u201cThis was an interview over a cup of coffee. The moment of realisation for me was sitting in the cafeteria, and seeing a hundred other PhDs there. The only distinction I had over them was Shakti. If I left it, I would just be another ball in the bag. So that\u2019s why I didn\u2019t leave,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Shakti has its talent locked in, clearly, but the big imponderable in the chips business is time. Delays are common, even more in academic efforts. So too with Shakti project. An EETimes story in January 2016 said tape out would happen that summer but as our reporting shows, it is now set for just before summer of 2018.<\/p>\n
Implications for India<\/b><\/h2>\n
India has been developing processors for nearly 20 years, what\u2019s new is that Shakti is the first effort to consolidate that, so that it is systematic, says Madhusudhan, the second coordinator of the project. \u201cA homegrown processor family, as a consistent effort to spread homegrown processors across the country \u2014 this is the first organized broad effort,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
The project could enable the production of homegrown CPUs that are open, patent-free and royalty free. If that sounds like heading into a commodity market, Madhusudhan begs to differ: \u201cIf you do commodity processors, it is a commodity industry. If you do state of the art secure processors, AI and ML processors, it is not a commodity industry\u2026 high-security processors is not,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can get very customised chips done at far cheaper cost than anybody else. Just like Tirupur does it for knitting, we\u2019re doing it for processors. We\u2019re also trying to incubate companies for handling specific portions of the task.\u201d says Madhusudhan, adding that his students might work on a couple of startups of their own.<\/p>\n
He shares an example of how the government is pushing for energy efficient fans and fridges, an area where the Shakti RISC-V processor could find a market-fit. \u201cThese use a brushless DC motor, which requires a small processor. We\u2019re talking to one entity that does close to a million fans a month.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can get very customised chips done at far cheaper cost than anybody else. Just like Tirupur does it for knitting, we\u2019re doing it for processors. We\u2019re also trying to incubate companies\u2026,\u201d says G S Madhusudhan of IIT, Madras<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
An industry veteran says the need for a domestic chipset is staring India in its face. \u201cOur consumption is so mismatched with our indigenous development which means that we are constantly dependant on somebody else to supply, for all our needs,\u201d says \u00a0P K Sundarajan, formerly the director of IP with Cosmic Circuits, a Bengaluru \u00a0semiconductor company that was snapped up \u00a0in 2013 by US-based Cadence Design Systems, a provider of tools and solutions for the semiconductor industry.<\/p>\n
The know-how to do these things definitely exists in India. It\u2019s just a question of putting the minds together and getting it done, Sundarajan says. \u201cIf you look at some of the Snapdragon cores, maybe its variants, I\u2019m fairly certain it was developed here in Bengaluru. If I look at whether raw talent is available here, there is no question at all. Even with Intel, a lot of the server processing cores probably happens here and likewise with AMD,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Prakash Mohapatra, an industry analyst, says that he has seen a lot of traction for the RISC-V standard in the last 5-6 months, which has led to a change in his earlier belief that it will not be able to dent the processor ecosystem.<\/p>\n
He also points out that over the last few years, ARM has shown interest in enabling custom SoCs at a low investment, through its DesignStart program. (SOC is short for system on a chip, which is an integrated circuit with \u00a0multiple computing components on a single substrate and is designed for specific applications. They are relatively cheap and consume less power.)<\/p>\n
A slowing down of Moore\u2019s law will drive SoC vendors to adopt RISC-V ISA, says Mohapatra. \u201cAs innovation in terms of processor technology is not happening, many companies are thinking of how exactly they can improve their performance without compromising on power. All this customisation can be a way of enhancing process nodes. Instead of newer processors, which are really expensive, you can go for custom SoCs, which are tuned to your application,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
While ARM dominates the smartphone market and Intel dominates the server market, a dominant player has yet to emerge in the areas of IoT and AI, areas where RISC-V could make inroads if an extensive ecosystem is in place, Mohapatra says.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy view is that it will definitely go out of this academic thing and it will go towards a commercial distribution and can actually pose a major threat to ARM,\u201d he says, cautioning that Shakti will have to climb a steep learning curve that is decades old.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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