IIT Madras & ISRO Successfully Boot Atmanirbhar SHAKTI-Based Aerospace Chip

IIT Madras in collaboration with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully developed and booted an aerospace-grade SHAKTI-based semiconductor chip. The success marks an important milestone on India's semiconductor self-reliance journey.
A Major Step in India's Semiconductor Independence

The IRIS was developed in an IIT-Madras team in collaboration with ISRO's Inertial Systems Unit-IISU-TVM, was fabricated at Chandigarh and packaged by Karnataka-based Tata Advance Systems. Hence, the fact that this piece of chip on the SHAKTI processor became a reality after all, heralds the increase in indigenous chip design and in-house semiconductor fabbing capabilities emerging in India, which has lately been seen trending upward.

Shakti is a class of open-source RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) based microprocessors led by Prof. V. Kamakoti from the Prathap Subrahmanyam Centre for Digital Intelligence and Secure Hardware Architecture (PSCDISHA) at IIT Madras. It is supported by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under the 'Digital India RISC-V' (DIRV) initiative. It envisions indigenous development of a processor with advanced security features.

Built for Space and Beyond

The IRIS chip was designed to fulfill the computing requirements of ISRO's critical missions, including command and control systems. The fault-tolerant internal memories and advanced serial bus interfaces were used to ensure that it is very reliable and scalable for future space applications. Finally, the chip underwent extensive hardware and software validation and was thus ready for its first deployment in one of ISRO's future missions.

A Truly Indigenous Effort

This achievement represents India's first indigenous capability of semiconductor technology from concept to delivery in the country. Key contributors include:

Conceptualization & Design: IIT Madras and IISU, Thiruvananthapuram

Manufacturing: SCL, Chandigarh

Packaging: Tata Advanced Systems, Karnataka

PCB Production: PCB Power, Gujarat

Assembly & Mounting: Syrma SGS, Chennai

Software Development & Booting: IIT Madras

Speaking on the achievement, Prof. V. Kamakoti, Director of IIT Madras, said: "After RIMO in 2018 and MOUSHIK in 2020, this is the third SHAKTI chip successfully fabricated and booted. This marks a milestone towards India's building a complete semiconductor ecosystem.

Dr. V. Narayanan, Chairman, ISRO, appreciated the effort and added, "This IRIS controller, designed using SHAKTI technology by IISU, is a glorious example of Indian semiconductor self-reliance. We will fly-test this soon and integrate the same in upcoming space missions".

Shri Kamaljeet Singh, Director General of SCL Chandigarh, said, "SCL is dedicated to taking the semiconductor capabilities of India forward. This successful fabrication in our 180nm technology node shows India's capability of developing niche products for strategic applications."

Path for Future Innovations

The success of the IRIS chip proves that India is getting greater expertise in the area of semiconductor design and fabrication, thus building momentum for the 'Atmanirbhar Bharat' vision in space technology and beyond. Development of indigenous processors would reduce dependency on foreign semiconductor technology, as India would start innovating for strategic and commercial applications in the next few years.