News & Analysis
Report: India to pursue homegrown microprocessor design
Kariyatil Krishnadas
7/16/2009 11:55 AM EDT
BANGALORE, India — The Indian government will reportedly bring together top engineers to design what is tentatively being called the "India microprocessor."
One of the design program's goals is helping to ward off what the government sees as the growing security threat poised by using commerical microprocessors in military, telecommunications and space systems.
According to a report this week in The Economic Times, the MPU design will be overseen by a new entity called the Zerone Corp., with an initial government investment of $200 million.
Engineers from various Indian research and technical institutes will work together on the chip design project, which will be managed by the federal Department of Information Technology.
The report, quoting unnamed sources, said a draft proposal will be presented soon to cabinet ministers seeking project funding. The Times also reported that a proposal mentioned that "unless India has its own microprocessor, we can never ensure that networks [and weapons] are not compromised."
Designers will likely adopt Sun Microsystems' OpenSparc processor design technology (the open-source version of Sun's UltraSPARC T1 and T2 microprocessors) along with the Linux operating system and MySQL open-source database software. The government is also reportedly concerned about future availability of foreign chip technologies. That concern prompted it to set up Zerone, which is looking to recruit 400 designers.
Poornima Shenoy, president of the India Semiconductor Association, said national security concerns dictate the need for a homegrown chip design. "It will also catalyze the local industry built around design activities," Shenoy said.
A senior chip industry executive here familiar with government programs told EE Times that the government's plan was flawed. "It is a mere regurgitation of old plans that went nowhere. When Intel x86 technology and Sun's Sparc technology were offered to the respective government departments in the past, they [did] not even bother to reply," he said.
"Why can't we get x86 technology and design it? Or get an ARM core and design around it? You do not need $200 million to design a chip. A few engineers from a local company like Wipro can design one. How will a government department keep a processor technology alive and support it. Nothing will come out of this program, just as nothing came out of such plans in the past," the executive said.
India's chip design industry focuses heavily on captive chip designs for overseas customers. Hence, these companies have no claim on intellectual property developed during the design process.
Earlier Indian chip initiatives fizzled. The so-called "Fab City" planned in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad to house private wafer fabs has largely switched over to solar energy projects.
The report said Zerone's revenues would come from microprocessor sales and support along with providing training for future chip designers. India also lacks a major chip foundry. The report did not address whether the government would use an overseas foundry to fabricate the projected microprocessor.
—K.C. Krishnadas is site editor of TechOnline India.
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Mapou
7/16/2009 4:21 PM EDT
Unnamed Chip Executive:
"Why can't we get x86 technology and design it? Or get an ARM core and design around it?"
Competing against the heavy weights on their own turf is foolish, in my opinion. Sun tried it with its expensive Rock chip and was forced to abandon the project. But why compete on their turf? The parallel programming crisis is an unprecedented opportunity for a real maverick (from India, maybe?) to shift the computing paradigm and forge a new future. Its obvious that neither Intel nor AMD have a solution. You can rest assured that Suns Rock chip will not be the last big chip failure in the industry. Get ready to witness Intels Larrabee and AMDs Fusion projects come crashing down like the Hindenburg.
Anybody who thinks that last centurys multithreading CPU and GPU technologies will survive in the age of massive parallelism is delusional, in my opinion. When the industry has suffered enough (its all about money), it will suddenly dawn on the decision makers that it is time to force the baby boomers (the Turing Machine worshipers) into retirement so that the industry can boldly break away from 20th centurys failed computing models.
Sun Microsystems blew it but that does not mean that others (or even Sun) should give up. This is a real opportunity for a tech-savvy country like India to fund big chip project, one designed to truly rock the industry this time around and ruffle as many feathers as possible. They could dominate the parallel processor industry for decades to come.
How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis:
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2008/07/how-to-solve-parallel-programming.html
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Kev-bo
7/17/2009 2:57 PM EDT
Seems like a pretty foolish waste of time and money. One can spend 200M$ developing a great processor, and I'm sure India has the talent to do so, but developing the software and peripherals eco-system would cost billions - where's the ROI in that. For example, Intel just paid 1B for Wind River and 1-2B to develop Atom, plus have Microsoft spending another 3-4B developign Windows stuff for mobile.
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Sundar Srinivasan
7/19/2009 10:42 AM EDT
This news makes no sense; just sensation. How come India having its own processor can ensure networks are not compromised? So they would insist all Indian networks to use this however inefficient that processor might be? Why should the goverment build a general purpose processor (app-specific processor is a different issue)? How would they fabricate it? A one billion dollar fab for just a single processor might not make sense. Would they have people in payroll permanently to release further versions? Would they also be developing their own memories, microcontrollers, operating systems, FPGA fabric, etc? I don't understand either the vision or the implementation plan (if there is one).
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aloy
7/19/2009 8:54 PM EDT
People heading Organizations like ISA don't know the difference between
Developing capabilities ( Critical for MCU development ) and actually developing a product itself ..
Its very important to have such Organizations to lead by people from the industry else they don't
work in practical sphere and will remain to give such comments .
Looks at china , they had the fancy of developing there own Mobile standard , looks what's happening
Now , they rollout is having issues (right now its in limited rollout ) you cant develop economics of scale
In such kind of products which is the key to the product success ..
Even if you make (based on Stubborn ideas of ISA ) who is going to continue to innovate bring new upgrades ,
It not like developing onetime solution not to mention complexity involved in devloping a ecosystem to sustain & support ..
Separate ideology and Practical possibility ,else you will end up like Indonesian dream of making there own passenger
Airline (which took of only once after spending of millions of dollars , based on the same logic Security !!!
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sekapr
7/20/2009 5:31 AM EDT
India designing it's own microprocessors?. Big joke. What else we can expect from ISA board where none have semiconductors background
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daleinaz
7/24/2009 11:42 AM EDT
While the concept is interesting ("Let's design our own CPU that will be immune to x86 binary code viruses"), the reality is that the money would be better spent making exisitng software more secure. Besides, "security through obscurity" seldom works for long.
Ask AMD and Freescale about how much money it takes to continue to design new CPUs to stay on the performance curve. It is NOT a one-time effort, you have to continually keep designing new, higher performance parts.
I agree with the "senior chip industry executive" that nothing will come out of this program, however, a LOT of money will go into it. The quoted $200 million is just the tip of the iceberg, expect 3x to 5x that amount before it is finally abandoned (and it WILL be abandoned eventually).
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