SHAKTI vs AJIT

 

                Researchers at IIT Bombay develop the country’s first indigenously designed and fabricated microprocessor.

                A microprocessor is an integrated circuit (IC) that contains a few millions of transistors (semiconductor-based electronic devices) fused on a semiconductor chip. It is just a few millimetres in dimension and is used in almost every electronic device—from the microwave and washing machine in homes to advanced supercomputers of a space station. However, developing and manufacturing a microprocessor is not easy—it is expensive, risky and needs much skill. Hence, only a handful of companies across the world have been able to manufacture and sell microprocessors successfully. 

                 In an attempt to make a mark in the highly competitive segment of microprocessor manufacturing, engineers from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) have developed a new microprocessor called AJIT—the first ever microprocessor to be conceptualised, designed, developed and manufactured in India. This innovation could not only reduce the country’s imports but also make India self-reliant in electronics.

            AJIT comes with an arithmetic logic unit that can do basic arithmetic and logical operations like addition, subtraction and comparison, and a memory management unit that stores and retrieves data from memory. There is also a floating point unit designed to handle calculations with non-integer numbers efficiently. For those who would like to program the microprocessor, there is a hardware debugger unit to help them monitor and control the processor.

            A processor made in India offers more than just the cost benefits. It provides the country with autonomy and self-reliance in the electronics sector and reduces our dependence on technology imported from other parts of the world. It also ensures a secure system with no opportunity for any backdoor entry, thus preventing digital sabotage by other countries or malicious organisations. So far, though we have had Indian teams design complete processors in India, no Indian company owns a commercially available microprocessor product. AJIT hopes to change that soon.

Shakti vs Ajit

            Shakti the first microprocessor designed and developed by IIT Madras where as Ajit is developed at IIT Bombay.

            Shakti is developed as a built in microprocessor which can be deliberately used in mobile computing and wireless devices.where as Ajit is used in the microwave and washing machine in homes to advanced supercomputers of a space station.

            The C-class processor of Shaksti works at clock frequency of 1.5 GHz and i-class ranges froom 1.5 to 2.0GHz. where as the AJIT can run one instruction per clock cycle and can operate at clock speeds between 70-120MHz, comparable to its competitors in the market.

            Shakti is one of the few open-source Microprocessor’s available in electronic markets.The researchers have made the software tools associated with Ajit freely available to everyone.The processor is also available as a ‘softcore’, where vendors can buy a license to use the design of the microprocessor and fabricate it to use it in their system. The researchers also offer to customise the processor for specific applications. The design of the processor is modular, and at some extra cost, vendors can get a processor design with a feature set suitable for the system they are designing.

SHAKTI processor is much smaller in size as compared to AJIT that is Shakti is typical microprocessor aimed to used in smartphones and other netwoeking devices,where as Ajit being bigger, is aimed at larger systems such as robotics and automation systems.

            Shakti is completely designed on new RISC-V ISA (Instruction set architecture),Where as the The AJIT microprocessor uses SPARC ISA architecture. SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) originally developed by Sun Microsystems.

            RIMO is the code name of the SHAKTI C-class based SoC (System on a Chip) with size of 144 sq.mm.where as  In the first stage, AJIT has been manufactured in the government-owned Semiconductor Laboratory (SCL), Chandigarh, with a technology that offers the smallest building block of the size 180 nanometers.

            Both shakti and Ajit have their own good features.

Similar Development

            Furthermore, it is worth mentioning, India has also developed its first RISC-V based processor Shakti last year. A team of researchers and students from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras have developed this chip and made the design open-sourced. The chip is clocking at 400MHz speed and a majority of the front-end design is done using verilog. The Shakti Project includes a family of six types of microprocessors and has been broadly categorised into base processors, multi-core processors and experimental processors. This chip is basically aimed in using towards smartphones and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

This blog is for academic activity.
Author - Mayuresh Patil