IIT Madras Introduces SDK For India's First Chipset Called Shakti

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in India had previously announced the first chipset to be made in India, namely Shakti. The processor has been on the track of development for 3 years and recently, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) has introduced a software development kit (SDK) for the chipset.

It is known that RISE group of IIT Madras has taken responsibility for Shakti’s development. Additionally, the group has revealed their plan to introduce 6 classes of Shakti in the market. The chipset’s six stages comprise of H-Class, S-Class, M-Class, C-Class, I-Class, and E-class. They are expected to be applied in various IoT devices, robotic platforms, and motor controls, just to name a few.

The C-Class chipset is a 2-bit 5 stage in-order micro controller-class of chipsets and is clocked at 0.2 - 1Ghz. Meanwhile, the I-Class processor is a 64-bit chipset with multithreading support and is clocked at 1.5 - 2.5GHz. The M-class chipset can have up to octa cores support and the similar clock speed.

Shakti’s S-Class processor is targeted at server-kind workloads. It looks like an I-Class chipset’s upgraded version with the identical multithreading support while the H-Class chipset is used for high-performance analytics and computing workloads. Besides, RISE Group has also been developing F-Class and T-Class chipsets.

Accordingly, the T-Class, which can support object-level security and coarse-grained tags for the micro-VM-like functionality to mitigate attacks aimed at software like buffer-overflow. Meanwhile, the F-Class, which can be considered an advanced version of the T-Class with additional support for redundant bus fabrics and compute blocks, ECC memory and functionality to discover permanent faults.

With the introduction of the SDK for Shakti, developers can start to develop apps for the Shakti chipsets, even before these processors are commercialized.