Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras is at the forefront of microprocessor innovation. The researchers from the institute have developed a completely Made in India chip called Moushik.
IIT Madras Professor Kamakoti Veezhinathan from the Reconfigurable Intelligent Systems Engineering (RISE) Group of Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Madras said that the open-source chip can be accessed by anyone for academic purposes.
The microprocessor chip captures the Indian design specifics and caters to the domestic requirements. According to the researchers, the chip can be used for the Smart City initiative implemented by the government.
Prof Kamakoti said, “Moushik can be interfaced with various sensors — such as pollution monitors, movement detectors, cameras and so on — which are integral devices that will be part of a smart city solution. We estimate several millions of these devices to be available in the market over the next few years.”
The sectors such as smart cards, credit, debit cards, travel cards, metro train and driving licenses can use this chipset. Even the electronic voting machines (EVMs) can benefit from using this chip. The microprocessor can also help in operating consumer electronic items such as washing machines, water pump monitoring system etc.
Kamakoti further added, “The current microprocessor ecosystem in the world thrives on architectures that are patented and licensed. IIT Madras chose to take up an open-source Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) (which is the set of instructions that a processor can execute) called RISC-V and develop microprocessors around this open-source ISA.”