Manjeera Digital Systems, a technology company that is incubated at the Centre of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H), has created a chip that is about 100 times faster in computing with low power consumption, according to Srini Chandupatla, one of the co-founders.
This can find a use across sectors like healthcare, robotics, defence and space, automative, surveillance, smart phones and drones and others.
“Many others tweak the existing architecture of a chip to get the desired results. We have been successful in creating a new chip from the scratch. Our work being done from 2013 has come to fruition,” he says adding that this new design will solve many problems encountered in advanced computing.
The high performance computing requirements are on the rise due to increased use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision processing, robotics, Internet of Things, self-driving cars, industrial automation and other segments.
“The complexity of processing is increasing and the current architecture cannot handle them without being tweaked. “There is no computing engine as of now to give high performance, low power consumptions, that is programmable and that is compact. Our chip offers all of them,” he says adding that it costs lower to make smaller chips.
Indian AI chip
It has now got about 100 chips made for evolving multiple use cases.
“Our chips will find a use in ISRO’s NavIC receivers. We are hopeful of our design winning an order from ISRO,” says Chandupatla.
NavIC or Navigation with Indian Constellation is a home-grown solution of ISRO which enables navigation in the Indian Ocean region using satellites. NavIC receivers will be useful in tracking trucks and commercial vehicles, he says.
Manjeera can give a physical chip or licence its intellectual property to other players for integrating with their System on Chip (SoC). A SoC is a circuit that integrates all components of a computer including a central processing unit, memory, input/output ports and secondary storage.
Manjeera has 24 people working. “We have a good business opportunity as we do not see anybody in India doing the kind of product we have,” says Chandupatla.
The company already caters to ISRO, Intel, Astra Microwave Products and OmniPhy, creating IP for application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), or bit files.
