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Fab in India: India is trying to create an indigenous chip-making industry

economist.com

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Re: Fab in India: India is trying to create an indigenous chip-making industry

#51

Post by ghettoimp »

analognoise wrote: post #48
happycube wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A ~20 year old process... that'd be 250nm or 180nm, which is Just Fine for many microcontrollers, if not the new 600mhz-1ghz Cortex M7's...

If the 180nm design is good enough, and migrated it to a new process, you'd get more chips per wafer. Hence never competitive. "It's open!" doesn't make a business decide to buy a million and put them in a product - cost, features, availability, support do. Nobody cares about "open silicon" - it's only spouted by people who don't understand actual electronics, or if they do, they certainly don't understand the econom…

From a corporate perspective, I think you're absolutely right, this kind of thing will never be profitable.

From a state perspective, being reliant on other countries for your electronic may seem like such a threat to your ability to remain sovereign that it's worth developing your own, even if you are generations behind the latest and greatest.

Re: Fab in India: India is trying to create an indigenous chip-making industry

#52

Post by analognoise »

ghettoimp wrote: post #51
analognoise wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the 180nm design is good enough, and migrated it to a new process, you'd get more chips per wafer. Hence never competitive. "It's open!" doesn't make a business decide to buy a million and put them in a product - cost, features, availability, support do. Nobody cares about "open silicon" - it's only spouted by people who don't understand actual electronics, or if they do, they certainly don't understand the econom…

From a corporate perspective, I think you're absolutely right, this kind of thing will never be profitable. From a state perspective, being reliant on other countries for your electronic may seem like such a threat to your ability to remain sovereign that it's worth developing your own, even if you are generations behind the latest and greatest.

True! But do you think they'd open up that process?

Hell no!

Re: Fab in India: India is trying to create an indigenous chip-making industry

#53

Post by Aperocky »

yarapavan wrote: post #2

Context: The designs are based on RISC-V ISA ( https://riscv.org ). When India looks east, it sees Huawei, a Chinese tech giant, being cut off from American-made components as a result of the trade war. To the west, it sees its most talented engineers working in Silicon Valley. By pouring millions of dollars into Indian-made semiconductors, India’s government hopes to solve both problems at once. The open source acad…

Best of luck to India. I sincerely hope that RISC-V will grant them the ability to produce commodity grade (even if low end) chips that can be utilized with open source software system. The first such use may well be industrial systems where OS and spec are not the major concern.

Re: Fab in India: India is trying to create an indigenous chip-making industry

#54

Post by saimiam »

stallmanite wrote: post #41
saimiam wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife’s most cited and quoted paper is on correctly defining the Indian middle class. Happy to share the link if there’s interest.

I’m interested, please post the link to the paper.

Original paper (pdf): https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sandhya_Krishnan/public...

Quora answer quoting her work (layman’s terms): https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-Indias-real-middle-class-in...

Re: Fab in India: India is trying to create an indigenous chip-making industry

#55

Post by saimiam »

selimthegrim wrote: post #49
stallmanite wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m interested, please post the link to the paper.

Yes, I’m interested too.

Original paper (pdf): https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sandhya_Krishnan/public...

Quora answer quoting her work (layman’s terms): https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-Indias-real-middle-class-in...

Re: Fab in India: India is trying to create an indigenous chip-making industry

#56

Post by saimiam »

saimiam wrote: post #39
accidentaldev wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same article has other stat that says anywhere between 30-300 million are considered middle class. Is there a consensus among economists on what the real number is ?

My wife’s most cited and quoted paper is on correctly defining the Indian middle class. Happy to share the link if there’s interest.

Original paper (pdf): https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sandhya_Krishnan/public...

Quora answer quoting her work (layman’s terms): https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-Indias-real-middle-class-in...

Re: Fab in India: India is trying to create an indigenous chip-making industry

#57

Post by hackworks »

madez wrote: post #4

I'm very excited about India's ambitions. It would not only be meaningful for India, but for many people around the world. We are lacking open chips, and project Shakti is on a trajectory to solve a part of that. I wonder when GCC learns to use the source code of the hardware along with the source code of the software to optimize the binary with full knowledge of the system.

GCC uses intrinsic functions when available during compilation. It does optimize for a specific architecture. Is there something beyond this you are referring to?
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