First In India: IIT Delhi Team Develops Micro-Graphics Processing Unit

New Delhi: In a breakthrough that is going to reduce India’s reliance on foreign hardware, researchers at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi have developed the country’s first working, demonstrable micro-Graphics Processing Unit (micro-GPU).

The micro-GPU designed indigenously is the brainchild of researchers at IIT Delhi’s Electrical Engineering Department.

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are widely used in modern computing hardware, including artificial intelligence and machine learning systems.

The micro-GPU architecture is designed to enable indigenous graphics and display-processing systems for embedded applications.

The hardware architecture is a scalable, programmable graphics processor suitable for applications such as industrial control displays, low-cost human-machine interfaces, e-rickshaw dashboard navigators, inland-water navigation terminals for small fishing boats, educational e-book readers, and other affordable embedded visualisation systems.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first working, demonstrable indigenously designed micro-GPU from a university in India,” the researchers said.

According to an IIT Delhi release, the project has demonstrated programmable graphics rendering using a custom floating-point GPU engine implemented entirely in Register Transfer Language (RTL) and mapped to a Spartan-7 Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform.