IIT Bombay Introduced 1st ‘Made In India’ Chip To Power Satellites

Along with the great innovation of electronics and technology, India is aiming to produce chips on its own as a solution to save production costs. IIT Bombay has helped our nation to take a big step forward to the promising future.

The Mumbai-based institute has introduced a microprocessor for Scalable Processor Architecture (SPARC), which is called AJIT. The most special thing in this product is that all factors from concept, design, development, to manufacture are completely conducted by Indian researchers.

In recent times, IIT Madras produced an open-source initiative called Shakti. This was the first time India itself managed to develop this kind of chip. The students at the university were in partnership with Bluespec – a semiconductor tool design firm – to design the RISC-V processor.

However, there are some certain differences between AJIT and Shakti. To be clearer, AJIT is designed for large systems such as automation systems, robots, appliances, and maybe workstations and servers in the future. Meanwhile, Shakti serves for smaller devices including IoT devices and smartphones.

In addition, AJIT is likely to be assembled into satellites. That is exactly the primary purpose of the researchers at IIT Bombay. Sharing with the AMA community on Reddit, a designer of the AJIT chip said,

At present, in each clock cycle, the latest initiative can run 01 instruction at speeds from 70 to 120MHz. However, in the future, the researchers hope that it can reach clock speeds between 400-500MHz. Although the chip was developed based on a 180nm technology, its later version may be upgraded to 65nm.

A lot of difficulties are still waiting ahead. Two of those hail from expensive production cost and complicated process. Anyway, we can’t deny IIT Bombay’s success. They at least made a really cheap processor which can be possibly sold at Rs 100 in 2020 or 2021.