Union Minister of State for Skill Development, Entrepreneurship, Electronics and Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Sunday said that the Centre was fully committed to making Digital India RISC-V (DIR-V) Microprocessor programme the Indian Instruction Set Architecture (ISA).
Virtually addressing the DIR-V Symposium organised by IIT-Madras, he said that DIR-V would help India become Atmanirbhar in semiconductors and a global hub for electronics system design and manufacturing.
The DIR-V programme, launched last year, aims at boosting India’s semiconductor ecosystem by creating advanced microprocessors. It would largely be driven by the creativity and innovation of Indian youth and start-ups across the globe, the Minister said, stressing the importance of such indigenous programmes. He noted that there was a growing demand for silicon chips owing to the ever-increasing digitalisation and for new applications that are yet to be discovered. “As the internet becomes more complex with the emergence of 5G and 6G, new applications will be discovered. There will be more opportunities for silicon chips, semiconductors and other systems. When we talk about performance and applications, I see a future where many of the digital products we use today such as cloud, data centres, mobiles, tablets, servers for cloud services, automotive technologies, sensors, IoT, 5G and 6G networks, will have DIR-V-based chips, devices and systems,” he said.
Our ambition in the India ‘Techade’ spans these areas — the automotive industrial space with IoT; mobility; and computing. Our goal is to make sure that DIR-V has a serious presence in all these three segments, the Minister added. He lauded the partnership between IIT-Madras and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), specifically in context of the DIR-V programme, highlighting how such collaborations create a hub for innovation.
Prof. V. Kamakoti, director, IIT-Madras, pointed out that Berkeley and MIT started RISC-V and they made it open source under a BSD licence, enabling users to customise it as per their requirements and the IIT-Madras had joined the initiative around 2014. “We are now on the cusp of releasing chips that can suit many requirements. Thanks to the many initiatives of the government, I am sure that within the next few months to a year, we will see prototype chips and products coming out of our own microprocessor,” he said.