We want to be god of small things: IIT team aims to fab India's first 65nm GPU

The chip might be small but the dreams and ambitions of a small IIT Delhi team that has developed it are big. The dream is to be the “god of small things”. In an exclusive conversation with India Today Tech, the IIT Delhi team details its idea behind the India’s first graphics chip it has indigenously designed and crafted. It is not a product yet, because that would involve fabricating it in a semiconductor fab and then validating it. But it is a beginning, which the team believes will lead to more homegrown graphics chip designs. The team calls the chip micro GPU (graphics processing unit) because it is not a full GPU like what we get from companies such as Nvidia and AMD. But at a time when Indian design teams are working on home-grown chips — IIT Madras recently showed Shakti processor — the new micro GPU chip from IIT Delhi adds to the overall picture. The micro-GPU has been developed by MTech students Nammi Akash and M Ravi Teja, under the guidance of Prof Jayadeva and Prof Kaushik Saha from IIT Delhi's Electrical Engineering Department. The team has demonstrated the programmable graphics processor on a Spartan-7 FPGA and is now looking at the next step: turning the design into an actual chip using 65nm technology. So what exactly has IIT Delhi built, and how does this homegrown GPU work? In a chat with India Today Tech, Prof Jayadeva and Prof Kaushik Saha walked us through the technology behind the micro-GPU, why the team is focusing on low-cost and low-power devices, and what it plans to do next. Homegrown GPU for smaller devicesA GPU does the heavy calculations needed to create images and graphics on a screen. The more powerful the GPU, the more calculations it can handle at once, but that can also mean higher power consumption.With its micro-GPU, the IIT Delhi team is taking a different approach. It is not trying to compete with Nvidia or other high-performance GPUs designed for demanding workloads. Instead, the researchers are focusing on smaller, low-cost devices where extreme graphics performance is not needed. “We are not aiming to compete with Nvidia,” Prof Saha told India Today Tech. “We are going to target edge applications on small form-factor devices, handhelds mostly, which consume very little power so that these can be proliferated in the Indian society and population.”Prof Jayadev explained the practical part of such a chip, and how it would be useful to many Indians. “Our micro GPU can power displays on electric vehicles or other such vehicles, medical diagnostic displays, and e-rickshaw meters, where we don't need screens to operate at very high speeds,” he said. Road from working prototype to actual chipBut these are early days and for now the IIT micro GPU is a concept rather than an actual product that can be tested and validated. That stage would be reached only when the chip has been manufactured, something that is rather tricky at the moment in India. Currently the GPU is a prototype implemented on an FPGA, a programmable piece of hardware that allows researchers to test their chip design. For the next step, which is etching the design on actual silicon wafer, the team is looking at the 65nm manufacturing process.Prof Jayadeva explains that moving the design to silicon will allow the team to test and improve the chip’s performance. “We would like to tape out or essentially realise this current design in the form of a VLSI ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit), where you will be able to optimise the performance even more than the current realisation, which is a mapping onto what's called a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA).” However, India currently does not have a fabrication facility that can manufacture chips using the 65nm technology the team is targeting. So, while the entire project is homegrown, for the final step, the team may need to get the actual chip manufactured outside India unless some of our planned silicon manufacturing facilities come online quickly. “At this moment, in India, we don't have the fabrication facility for 65-nanometer ASIC chip technology. So we will have to look for fabs abroad,” says Prof Saha. The team is also looking at partnerships with industry, PSUs, and government organisations to manufacture the first version of the chip.India hopes to bring chip fabrication homeThe researchers hope that India’s growing semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem will eventually allow such designs to be fabricated domestically. “As far as fabrication is concerned, we know that under Semicon India, already some fabs are being built in Gujarat, Assam, Odisha, etc. So we hope that as and when these fabs come up and become functional, we will be able to use them for our subsequent efforts,” says Prof Saha.Beyond the current prototype, the team also has a roadmap for a more advanced version of the micro-GPU. According to IIT Delhi, this includes an 8–16-core vector-style graphics processor, along with an optimised compiler and graphics software toolchain.But perhaps the bigger ambition behind India’s homegrown GPU is to give other researchers and startups something to build on. Prof Jayadeva says the team hopes making the design available will encourage more applications and more complex hardware projects in India.“We are hoping that the availability of this design to a large number of potential startups or students to build other projects will foster the growth of lots of applications and products, and it will spur the growth of even more complex designs,” he says. “We are providing a starting point... We would like to be the God of small things.”- Ends