IIT-M Designs India’s First Indigenous Microprocessor

The Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) has designed India’s very own developed Microprocessor, a first of its kind for the country. This can be used in mobile computing devices and could be adopted in the strategic defence and nuclear sectors.

Reportedly, the efficiency and quality of the microprocessor is such that it is easily on par with those used in foreign countries. This will reduce India’s reliance on imported microprocessors, especially in the communication and defence sectors. It can also be used in embedded low power wireless systems and networking systems.

Called ‘Shakti’, the processors were fabricated at Semi-Conductor Laboratory (SCL), Indian Space Research Organizations (ISRO) in Chandigarh, making it the first ‘RISC V Microprocessor’ to be completely designed and made in India, said an official statement from IIT-M. “This development will assume huge significance when systems based on Shakti processors are adopted by strategic sectors such as defence, nuclear power installations and government agencies and departments”, it said.

Another crucial aspect of the development of such an indigenous system was reducing the risk of deploying systems that might be infected with back-doors (a defect in a computer system that allows unauthorized access to data) and hardware Trojans (a malicious modification of the circuitry of an integrated circuit, which can tamper with a IP address).

With the advent of Digital India, there are several applications that require customisable processor cores. The 180nm fabrication facility at SCL Chandigarh is crucial in getting these cores manufacturers within our Country,” said Prof. Kamakoti Veezhinathan, Lead Researcher, Reconfigurable Intelligent Systems Engineering (RISE) Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT-M.

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