India selects RISC-V for semiconductor self-sufficiency contest: Use these homegrown cores to build kit
(2020/08/19)
- Reference: 1597800609
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/08/19/india_microprocessor_challenge_risc_v/
- Source link:
India has announced a national competition to foster the use of the nation's homegrown RISC-V microprocessor designs in the hope the tech will eventually replace imported parts, and be used to create products in demand around the world.
The contest's organizers argue India needs its own silicon to power all manner of things, from "public utility services such as surveillance, transportation, and environmental-condition monitoring" to "commodity appliances like smart fans, locks, and washing machines.” India’s government also wants its own chip families for its aerospace, defense, and nuclear sectors, on the grounds it can only be satisfied security-wise if it uses homemade products.
Hence the national competition that calls for startups and students to build one of 25 [1]suggested devices , which range from internet-of-things gadgets to drones, robots and even a gas pipe leakage detector, using the country's homegrown CPU cores.
Specifically, we're talking about two designed-in-India microprocessor designs, the 32-bit [2]Shakti and the 64-bit [3]VEGA . Both were developed by the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, while working with the Center for Development of Advance Computing, and both implement the open-source, royalty-free [4]RISC-V instruction set architecture. They’re both open-source, too, which isn't required by RISC-V.
Shakti comes in [5]six variants that serve applications ranging from embedded applications to servers and HPC workloads. The VEGA is available in [6]five variants . Both families are due to be baked in actual physical system-on-chips, and right now are available as a soft implementations.
Competition hopefuls will be given Artix7-35T or an Artix7-100T FPGA boards to run their chosen processor as a soft core, and create their entry.
The contest will run for ten months. Indian officials acknowledge it's all the start of a rather longer effort to both enhance the nation’s semiconductor design and manufacturing capabilities and an ecosystem to make it all happen and meet India’s desire for silicon self-sufficiency. ®
Get our [7]Tech Resources
[1] https://innovate.mygov.in/swadeshi-microprocessor-challenge/#tab7
[2] https://shakti.org.in/index.html#intro
[3] https://vegaprocessors.in/index.html
[4] https://riscv.org/technical/specifications/
[5] https://shakti.org.in/processors.html
[6] https://vegaprocessors.in/vega.html
[7] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
The contest's organizers argue India needs its own silicon to power all manner of things, from "public utility services such as surveillance, transportation, and environmental-condition monitoring" to "commodity appliances like smart fans, locks, and washing machines.” India’s government also wants its own chip families for its aerospace, defense, and nuclear sectors, on the grounds it can only be satisfied security-wise if it uses homemade products.
Hence the national competition that calls for startups and students to build one of 25 [1]suggested devices , which range from internet-of-things gadgets to drones, robots and even a gas pipe leakage detector, using the country's homegrown CPU cores.
Specifically, we're talking about two designed-in-India microprocessor designs, the 32-bit [2]Shakti and the 64-bit [3]VEGA . Both were developed by the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, while working with the Center for Development of Advance Computing, and both implement the open-source, royalty-free [4]RISC-V instruction set architecture. They’re both open-source, too, which isn't required by RISC-V.
Shakti comes in [5]six variants that serve applications ranging from embedded applications to servers and HPC workloads. The VEGA is available in [6]five variants . Both families are due to be baked in actual physical system-on-chips, and right now are available as a soft implementations.
Competition hopefuls will be given Artix7-35T or an Artix7-100T FPGA boards to run their chosen processor as a soft core, and create their entry.
The contest will run for ten months. Indian officials acknowledge it's all the start of a rather longer effort to both enhance the nation’s semiconductor design and manufacturing capabilities and an ecosystem to make it all happen and meet India’s desire for silicon self-sufficiency. ®
Get our [7]Tech Resources
[1] https://innovate.mygov.in/swadeshi-microprocessor-challenge/#tab7
[2] https://shakti.org.in/index.html#intro
[3] https://vegaprocessors.in/index.html
[4] https://riscv.org/technical/specifications/
[5] https://shakti.org.in/processors.html
[6] https://vegaprocessors.in/vega.html
[7] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Expecte fallout
Jim Mitchell
Does the article anywhere say that this move by India is related to US export regulations? I'm confused.
It sounds sensible
cbars
But the thing that nags at me is that if all countries start using different chips, isn't that a wider attack surface...? The incumbents are riddled with hard to patch holes, are these going to be any better? At least with a low number of widespread vendors people like the Linux foundation were actually able to create software mitigations... not sure that will be true if everyone is running different hardware, open source or not. Can anyone more knowledgeable weigh in, does adopting the home-grown model actually reduce risk when it comes to Internet connected devices?
Expecte fallout
This business of the US demanding licenses for the export of technology from third party countries has a long history, It was a product of the Cold War and was very much in evidence in the 1980s when it caused things like the need to get export licenses from the US to sell semiconductors made in Scotland, memory packs made in Japan (and exported to Europe from the UK) and anything at all that included encryption. Common sense prevailed post-Cold War and the worst of the regulations stopped being enforced but those regulations stilll continued to exist, lying it wait for an opportunity to be used against a new 'enemy'.
The only place this has really been an issue was with encrpytion. The heavy handed behavior of the US meant that any post-DES encrpytion standard had to be developed and standardized outside the US. Without this we'd require export licenses for anything that included encrpytion -- that's every wireless access point (and yes, I was an early developer in the US and, yes, we had to apply for export licenses for the kit because it included the RC4 cypher used with WEP).
By dusting this off and applying this to what is essentially a commerical competitor the US has sent a very strong message that using any American technology in a product carries significant risk. What should have been obsolete regulations, regulations that applied to military and other sensitive technology, has been widened to include all techhology and the scope includes third party suppliers nominally not subject to US jurisdiction. This is the sort of thing that serves as a wake up call to nations -- they might have to put up and shut up in the short term but long term it will harm US business because without some cast iron guarantees that no maverick governemtn will pull a stunt like this ever again you'd be mad to buy or use anything American ever again.