Introduction
As one of the early members and creators of the SHAKTI processor program and the founder of InCore Semiconductors, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing and contributing to the remarkable evolution of the RISC-V Architecture (ISA) in India. This journey, of more than a decade, has been nothing short of revolutionary, transforming the landscape of processor design and offering new possibilities for innovation in our country.
RISC-V, with its open and extensible Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), has emerged as a game-changer in the processor industry – worldwide. It provides a flexible foundation for creating custom processors tailored to specific applications, from embedded systems to high-performance computing. The importance of RISC-V cannot be overstated, as it empowers designers with the freedom to innovate without the constraints of proprietary architectures.
In India, the growth of RISC-V has been particularly noteworthy. What started as academic and government initiatives, primarily through the SHAKTI program at IIT Madras and CDAC’s VEGA series, has blossomed into a growing ecosystem of startups, research institutions, and industry collaborations. The SHAKTI program laid the groundwork for open-source RISC-V development, while CDAC’s VEGA processors demonstrated the potential for RISC-V in high-performance computing applications. These efforts reflect our nation’s increasing technological prowess and our commitment to self-reliance in critical technologies.
In the upcoming series of blogs, we’ll explore the journey of RISC-V in India, focusing primarily on the evolution from the pioneering efforts of SHAKTI to the cutting-edge offerings of InCore. While acknowledging the contributions of initiatives like CDAC’s VEGA series, our main comparison will be between SHAKTI and InCore due to the availability of detailed public information, particularly in terms of Performance, Power, Area (PPA) and Ecosystem metrics.
Whether you’re an engineer looking to integrate RISC-V into your next design or a manager evaluating the strategic benefits of RISC-V adoption, this blog series aims to equip you with the knowledge to navigate the exciting world of Indian RISC-V processor architecture.
Join me as we explore the past, present, and future of RISC-V in India!
SHAKTI: The Pioneer of RISC-V in India
Of the SHAKTI processor program, I can speak firsthand about its inception and impact during my tenure from 2013 to 2020. It’s important to note that the information presented here is based on my direct experience and publicly available information since then.
Background and Achievements
SHAKTI emerged as India’s first serious foray into the world of RISC-V. While born with a very innocent academic goal to bolster processor research in the country, SHAKTI soon took on a grand vision to create indigenous processor technology that could cater to our nation’s unique needs and aspirations – both academic and strategic. This brave vision was a culmination of the capability & outreach that Prof. Kamakoti (current director @ IITM) had fostered over the years, and the foresight that Madhusudan GS brought from the industry perspective.
Did you know that SHAKTI (from IIT Madras) was one of the founding members of the RISC-V Foundation? In fact, Madhu (CEO @ InCore) and I had the opportunity to be among the first presenters at the first RISC-V workshop in Monterey, USA, in 2013.
As the ambition of SHAKTI grew, so did the team. At its peak, SHAKTI had close to 40+ team members with the youngest being a 20-year-old undergrad and the oldest in the room being 50+ years old carrying close to 2 decades worth of industrial experience. The team was involved in everything that you could imagine it would take to build a world class processor ecosystem – playing with custom instruction sets, implementing 3 families of cores, building SoCs, FPGA prototyping, porting OSes, SDKs/IDEs, silicon engineering, building boards, demos, applications, training and so much. It was never a dull day at SHAKTI.
While young engineers saw contributing to the SHAKTI program as a major steppingstone for their careers, the experienced ones were pouring all their wisdom and knowledge into the program fired with their motivation to bring India into the world’s semiconductor map.
With SHAKTI came a lot of firsts for India
SHAKTI has had and continues to have many wins, milestones and achievements under its belt. It stands true to its initial goal of strengthening academia with RISC-V. In the last few years, I have had the opportunity to work closely with a few professors in different universities, and never have I had to introduce SHAKTI to them. In fact, in most cases I would be surprised by the kind of research and courses they have been carrying out with SHAKTI on their own.
SHAKTI addressed the academic noble cause very well and made it to the headlines quite a few times during my tenure. Below is a list of a few selected achievements:
- Successfully taping out multiple RISC-V cores, demonstrating the feasibility of indigenous processor design. Notable among these were:
- The SHAKTI C-class core fabricated on 22nm technology in collaboration with Intel and HCL (2017). All components of this processor were designed at IIT-Madras by less than 15 students and was completely open source.
- In the same year, The C-Class core fabricated again in 180nm technology SCL, making it the first RISC-V chip designed and fabricated entirely in India (2017). We were truly riding the “Make-in-India” wave at this point.
- The SHAKTI E-class core was also fabricated on 180nm technology SCL, demonstrating capabilities in the deep embedded space (2019).
All the above were test chips designed to showcase capability and confidence in the designs being built at IIT-Madras.
- Creating a range of processors from simple microcontroller-class cores to more complex out-of-order designs. Going from building a single core to building a family of cores was something no academia had ventured into in those early days.
- Collaborating with government and industry partners and adopters, including:
- IGCAR – an initial adopter of C–class deployed on FPGAs at the nuclear facility. This was a project which truly leveraged the customization feature of RISC-V to replace legacy end-of-life products in a strategic sector. Visting their facility and seeing the FPGAs run our Cores, provided a level of satisfaction like none other.
- Thales for exploring safety critical multi-core platforms. We built a very robust model and implementation of the criticality aware networks which connected multiple c-class cores. A majority of this team went on to pursue masters/PhDs in the US later.
- Western Digital for exploring custom instruction frameworks in RISC-V. This was one of the first avatars of automation taking shape within SHAKTI. This project also provided InCore its first employee 🙂
- Bluespec (BSV) for high-level synthesis tools, support, training and guidance. Today IITM is one of the premier institutes with excellent knowledge and command of BSV and continues to use it for almost all their projects.
- MeitY for financial and strategic support and guidance – without which I’d probably be sitting behind a cubicle in an MNC at this point in my life 😊
- Orchestrating and supporting the Swadeshi Processor challenge, which was designed to promote indigenous development of microprocessors and encourage startups and students to create products using home-grown processor IPs. This was one such event which took SHAKTI to the masses very fast.
- Numerous publications and research papers around SHAKTI. As highlighted here, at least 8 different publications based on SHAKTI are available which vary from adding security features, fault tolerant features and/or enabling next gen compute like POSITs.
It’s important to note that the achievements listed here represent only a fraction of SHAKTI’s impact on India’s RISC-V landscape. The project’s contributions extend far beyond what can be comprehensively covered in this blog, encompassing numerous technical innovations, collaborations, and educational initiatives that have collectively advanced India’s position in the global processor arena.
While SHAKTI laid a strong bedrock for RISC-V in India, the journey of commercializing it through InCore was filled with interesting challenges – supporting open-source vs closed-source, keeping pace with RISC-V, intellectual property concerns and many more. These challenges may seem specific to SHAKTI and InCore, but they are also common challenges that one encounters while moving any lab project to market. My next post is going to talk about how InCore addressed some of the challenges.
Until the next one,
Neel
👾