Tunga, a India Co made RISC V powered SoC handles fractions using Posit

Date: 08/04/2022
Calligo Technologies, a Bangalore-based AI driven analytics company incubated by Semiconductor Fabless Accelerator Lab (a government of Karnataka's initiative) has come out with a RISC V based system-on-chip named TUNGA. This chip has a speciality of featuring Posit Numeric Unit (PNU). Posit Numeric Unit (PNU) consumes lesser silicon space than IEEE FPU but delivers higher accuracy, higher dynamic range and entropy per bit, making it possible to replace 64-bit floats with 32-bit Posit safely in many cases. Semiconductor Fabless Accelerator Lab (SFAL) through its eco-system has made available VLSI chip design EDA tools and silicon manufacturing to Calligo.

Indian headed US headquartered UST has also invested in this project. This new chip is going to be used in accelerator boards targeting high-performance computing under make in India initiative.

Calligo in its release praised our honourable Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi who had recently said that India has no option but to be 'atmanirbhar' (self-reliant) when it comes to semiconductors and this sector has brought new possibilities for Make in India - at a post-budget webinar on 'Make in India for the World' organized by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade. TUNGA SoC is designed keeping in view of the growing market processor chips to handle more edge-computing and cloud side datacentre computing.

The SoC can compute fractional numbers using the Posit Number System (PNS) using what company claims has highly power-efficient and computationally accurate core CRISP. The alpha version of ASIC silicon-chip and the accelerator card is scheduled to be released by this year end. Calligo Technologies received critical support from go-to resource for RISC-V company Bluespec in developing this chip. CalligoTech minimized CRISP’s time-to-market using Bluespec's RISC-V Factory. Bluespec says its RISC-V Factory supplies the missing layers of productization, enabling safe and easy deployment of RISC-V open source hardware.

Commenting on the innovative product development, Gilroy Mathew, VP & Global Head of Semiconductor Engineering, UST, said, "UST is always at the forefront of innovation. Our joint effort to develop CRISP-based SoC will transform us to build more innovative AI & HPC Silicon Chipsets for our worldwide customers."

Anantha Kinnal, Chairman and Managing Director, Calligo Technologies, said, "In building TUNGA SoC, Calligo will expand from its software-only focus to end-to-end Product offering consisting of Silicon, Board, Firmware, Software and Applications for the emerging markets. Calligo's accelerator board, as an add-on to any standard Server, is expected to significantly increase the performance of HPC and AI systems. Bluespec's Octopus will be an integral part of this overall solution."

Karnataka IT Venture (KITVEN) CEO, A. R. Jayakumar quoted, "Our vision is to provide long-term capital to early and growth-stage start-ups in the State of Karnataka in specific focus areas to enable them to build competitive products and solutions. We are thrilled to invest in Calligo and aid their product development in accelerating HPC and AI workloads."

Author: Srinivasa Reddy N
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