This Indian Startup is Reinventing Chip Design | Neel Gala, CTO/Co-Founder, InCore Semiconductors

[00:01:49] Microprocessors: Understanding what they are

[00:03:08] SHAKTI Processor: Origin Story and Neel’s involvement

[00:10:43] InCore: What does it do?

[00:11:23] Decoding a Processor: What are the layers inside?

[00:15:25] IP in the Processor Business: How is it sold, bought and protected?

[00:21:07] Microprocessor Design Cycle: How is InCore reducing it?

[00:26:44] A Bug in a Million Transistor Chip: The truth behind building chips

[00:28:17] SOC Generator Platform: What does it mean?

[00:32:04] AI taking over the Semiconductor industry: Why is it not possible?

[00:36:17] Masters in IITM instead of Abroad: What made Neel stay at IIT Madras?

[00:41:33] SHAKTI Processor to InCore Semiconductors: The journey from lab to market

[00:45:14] Silicon-Proof: What does it mean and how to get there?

[00:47:35] Making the Tough Choices in a Business: Tackling the fear of attempting 

[00:50:32] Scaling in the Semiconductor Industry: The first customer is the toughest

[00:52:34] IP and Innovation in Silicon at the Global Level: The shift in the last decade

[00:54:28] RISC-V in the Global Context: What does it mean and the reason for India’s focus

[01:03:15] Closing thoughts: Neel’s advise to young people?

[00:03:46] IIT Madras

[00:06:41] Neel and his team started having conversations with University of California, Berkeley about their RISC after looking at the OpenPOWER instruction set

[00:09:24] The InCore team started working with a DRDO lab to understand how the defence sector uses processors

[00:01:15] PeakXV is one of the investors of InCore Semiconductors.

[00:03:15] Neel mentions starting his Master’s program with Professor V Kamakoti 

[00:06:45] G S Madhusudan, CEO of InCore, was consulting with Neel’s team and suggested the discussion with Berkley

[00:07:14] Madhusudan emailed David Patterson and the team working on RISC-V at Berkley to ask them to stop changing the instruction set

[00:15:05] Deepak Sahoo is the Chief Marketing Officer at InCore Semiconductors

[01:02:04] Neel quotes Bhavish Aggarwal’s Krutrim AI as an example of someone building an Indian solution for an Indian problem.

[00:04:02] Intel and IBM would share older processor models for research with colleges in India 

[00:19:46] NVIDIA and ARM are also IP companies

[00:58:35] Google is one of the companies in the RISC-V Consortium

[00:58:58] Facebook has also adopted the RISC-V architecture.

[00:05:49] OpenPOWER instruction set, also known as Power ISA, is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture developed by the OpenPOWER foundation released by IBM

[00:05:53] An instruction set is the fundamental layer between hardware and software 

[00:06:43] RISC-V is a free and open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on reduced instruction set computer principles

[00:08:46] The aim of SHAKTI was parity. A parity processor refers to a processor that incorporates parity checking, a method of error detection used during data processing or transmission.

[00:14:54] FPGA [Field Programmable Gate Array] is a type of integrated circuit (IC) that can be configured by a designer after manufacturing to perform specific digital logic operations

[00:28:17] SOC [System on a Chip] is a single integrated circuit that contains all the necessary components of a computer or electronic system  

[00:29:41] In VLSI [Very Large Scale Integration] design, Power, Performance and Area (PPA) are three critical metrics that designers must balance to achieve optimal chip designs. A chip must be low power, high performance and low area.