Govt committed to backing industry in developing cutting-edge competitive systems: Rajeev Chandrasekhar

The government is fully committed and ready to back the industry in developing cutting-edge competitive systems, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekar said on Sunday.

India has an exciting opportunity and to make that opportunity fruitful, it should focus on developing commercially and globally competitive technology, he said at an event.

"The government is fully committed to making sure that DIR-V (Digital India RISC-V) microprocessor is the Indian ISA (Instruction Set Architecture), and we are ready to back the industry in developing cutting edge competitive systems," he said in a virtual address at the Digital India RISC-V Symposium.

The Government of India, working towards realising the ambition of self-reliance under the 'Atmanirbhar Bharat' campaign, has rolled out the Digital India RISC-V Microprocessor programme with an overall aim to make micro-processors for the future in India.

RISC stands for 'Reduced Instruction Set Computer' and 'V' stands for fifth generation. The RISC-V project commenced in 2010 and it aims to deliver a new level of free extensible software (software that allows new functionality and capability additions) and hardware freedom on architecture.

Chandrasekhar recalled that less than a decade ago, India was a consumer of technologies. "India was a large market that consumed technologies and innovations that were innovated outside of this country and we were on the edges of this core deep tech ecosystem of semiconductors, electronics and high performance systems," he said.

"It was in 2015 that a vision was laid out by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that India must transform from a consumer of technologies to a country where our innovators and start-ups are architecting and designing platforms, as much as any other nation in the world," he said.

Congratulating IIT-Madras for the DIR-V programme, Chandrasekhar said, "Between IIT Madras and C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing), you are certainly becoming a beacon to all of the other academic institutions around the world who are interested in becoming part of this rapidly galloping ecosystem of semiconductors and electronics innovation."

The next coming years are going to be about "performance, performance, and performance", and it would also be based on the "ability of our systems to outperform other comparable systems" (globally) based on the Indian Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)," Chandrasekhar said.

"This is an important message that I want to give to Kamakoti (IIT Madras Director) and we expect DIR-V to have tremendous applications within the Indian ecosystem" he said. IIT Madras Director and professor V Kamakoti said, "Today is a very important event in the journey of semiconductors, which our country has embarked on."

"We started this journey during 2013-14 when we believed that there was going to be a major digital revolution that was going to happen globally and that many electronic devices were going to come closer to our lives," Kamakoti said. The symposium was organised by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, IIT Madras and the IIT-Madras Pravartak Technologies Foundation.

Nearly 700 people, including students, industry professionals, researchers, took part in the event held at IIT Madras Research Park.