Indian engineers are hoping to develop its first 64bit microprocessor once the government’s R&D division receives about $45 million funding before June. If funding is released as expected, the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), a branch of India’s Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, could assemble a 64-bit RISC-V processor in about 30 months, said Biju C. Oommen, a senior manager in C-DAC’s chip design unit. The team consists of about 70 engineers who have designed a wide variety of 8- to 32-bit processors and SoC blocks reports EE Times.
Separately a team of about 30 designers at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras has been working for more than two years on a family of 32- and 64-bit open source processors based on RISC-V. The work started in 2011 under the name Shakti which means power and the chips originally used IBM Power cores.
“We focus on IoT devices partly because that’s a buzzword, there’s a requirement in India for them and most volumes are there, be we also have a five-stage pipeline design for higher end embedded stuff,” said G. S. Madhusudan, a principal scientist working on the project at IIT Madras. Madhusudan said he expects at least one startup will be formed soon to develop a variant of a Shakti chip targeting government requirements for high security.
