IITM-Thales tie up for fault tolerant Shakti processor framework

The Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) on Monday said that it was partnering with diversified French conglomerate Thales to design a Shakti Risc-V processor compatible with safety critical standards. Shakti is India's first indigenously-built chip.

In a statement issued here, the IIT-M said with this tie up, a fault-tolerant Shakti framework would be developed and will undergo evaluation by the world's top experts in safety critical standards.

"Pursuant to their approval, it can be used in sensitive equipment in defence, aerospace, space, and transportation sectors," the institute said.

According to the IIT-M, joint research programmes will be taken up by Thales in areas like aerospace, space, transportation, security and defence.

Thales, an international group, designs and builds electronic systems for aerospace, space, transportation, security and defence.

It will draw on its expertise in the security and dependability of critical embedded systems to establish security best practices for hardware development.

The ultimate objective is to improve the security and dependability of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, embedded systems and machine learning implementations.

Researchers at IIT-M recently designed, fabricated and booted up India's first Indigenously-developed RISC V microprocessor - Shakti.

The Shakti family of processors are targeted for mobile computing devices, embedded low power wireless systems and networking systems, besides reducing reliance on imported microprocessors in communications and defence sectors, the statement said.

"This tie-up with Thales, I am sure, will result in a detailed analysis of these features resulting in a framework that could be adopted for designing the next generation Shakti-based safety-critical systems," Kamakoti Veezhinathan, Lead Researcher, Reconfigurable Intelligent Systems Engineering (RISE) Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT-M was quoted as saying in the statement.

By adopting an open approach to both hardware and software, this joint effort will create new opportunities for the design of mission-critical systems in all sectors, including aerospace, space, transportation, security and defence. With this, we look forward to taking our partnership, which was formed in March this year, to the next level," the statement quoted Arnaud Samama, R&D computing manager, Thales Research and Technology, as saying.

--IANS

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