CHENNAI: IIT-Madras Kamakoti Veezhinathan will speak on “Chip design, fabrication and the story of ‘ between 4pm and 5 30pm on Saturday as part of the Varahamihira Science Forum’s 38th lecture.

The session – Shakti – is the first open-source initiative by the Reconfigurable Intelligent Systems Engineering (RISE) group at the Indian Institute of Technology – Madras to develop the first indigenous industrial-grade processor, said a release.

“The aim of Shakti initiative includes building an open source production-grade processor, complete System on Chips (SoCs), development boards and a Shakti-based software platform. The primary focus of the team is architecture research to develop SoCs, which is competitive with commercial offerings in the market concerning area, power and performance. The Talk will focus on chip design and fabrication, the strategic importance of self-reliance in this area, the story of the Shakthi Processor and a lot more,” it said.

Kamakoti Veezhinathan is a professor of computer science and engineering at IIT-Madras. He specializes in the area of computer architecture, information security, and VLSI design. He also heads the Microprocessor Development Programme and the Information Security Education and Awareness Programme funded by the Union ministry of electronics and information technology. He was the Chairman of the Artificial Intelligence Task Force constituted by the Union ministry of commerce and industry.