Shakti – The First Microprocessor of India

Shakti is the first Microprocessor Of India which is designed and developed by the students of IIT (Indian Institute Of Technology) Chennai. It is built with a microchip that is manufactured or created at ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) Chandigarh.

As per the announcement of Professor Veezhinathan from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IITM, This microprocessor will never get outdated as it is made with all the international standards and it is one of the few open-source microprocessors available in the world market.

The basic design of this microprocessor started with selecting the best ISA ( Instruction Set Architecture).

As said by the Professor this Microprocessor is completely designed based on the new RISC – V ISA. RISC – V ISA is free and open ISA which is creating a new era of processor innovation.

RISC-V ISA being the best delivers the free, extensible software and hardware freedom on architecture. It is the revolutionary Processor where it laid a path to computing design and innovation for the next 50 years.

The root concept and the making of the basic design of this processor and some initial work have started in the year 2011. After a long time of 6 years, finally, in the year of 2017, the fund of Rupees 11 crore was granted by the Indian Government and this project gained a speed.

Finally, it has been proved that India can also design and market its microprocessor and it is the proud moment to the country.

Professor also said that the design of this processor is being asked by many other countries and even when it comes to the point of security has its significance.

The significance of Shakti:

• Since the design of the Shakti is Unique and is made of International standards, it can be used in many sectors.
• It is mainly designed for embedded low power wireless systems and networking systems.
• It is also reducing the trust in the imported microprocessors which are being used in the sectors of communication and defense.
• Shakti will have a huge significance when it gets started using in the defense, government agencies, and departments.

More about Shakti:

Shakti is not only limited to one particular processor. It is the huge family of six processors which rely on the RISC – V ISA.

Shakti has divided its ecosystem into three types of processors namely

• The Base Processors
• The Multi-Core Processors
• Experimental Processors.

The Base Processors:

These Base Processors are again classified into three types:

1. E – Class Processor:

The E-Class processor is the embedded class processor. It is mainly used to run the basic RTOS like Zephyr and eChronos which are more commonly used in sensors, robotics, and smart cards.

It is an open-source IP which supports the RV 32/64 – iMac. It only supports the machine and user modes.

2. C – Class Processor:

The C-Class Processor is the controller class processor that is used for the medium-range applications. This processor is highly optimized and designed with the MMU support and it runs on the operating systems like LINUX. This processor will completely support the RISC – V ISA.

3. I – class Processor:

The I – Class processor is completely made with features like multi-threading, nonblocking caches, and more which are completely performance-oriented. The range of this processor is between 1.5 to 2.5 GHz.

The Multi-Core Processors:

These Multi-Core Processors are again classified into three types.

1. M – Class Processor:

The M – Class Processor is designed with eight different cores that are made with both C and I class cores.

2. The S – Class Processor:

The S – Class Processor is used in the Enterprises server and  Work Stations. The core of this processor is the expanded version of the I – Class processor which supports the concept of multithreading.

3. The H – Class Processor:

The configuration of the H – Class Processor is SoC which is used in the Analytics workloads.  It is made with both C – Class and I – Class processors.

The Experimental Processors:

These Experimental Processors are again classified into two types:

1. The T – Class Processor:

The T-Class processor is another type of C-Class processor which is used for object-level security.

2. The F – Class Processor:

The version of fault-tolerant of the base processors is named as T – Class processors. The main features of this processor include DMR, TMR, lock-step configurations, and bus fabrics.

Please refer to this link to know more about the first microprocessor – Shakti.