Indigenous In-Memory Computing Chip Developed by BITS Pilani Under National Supercomputing Mission

The Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani has developed India’s first indigenous In-Memory Computing Chip under the National Supercomputing Mission, an initiative by the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India. The proprietary chip design, for which a patent is pending, was entirely developed at BITS Pilani, with the prototype fabricated at the Semiconductor Laboratory in Chandigarh (SCL).

The chip is available in two prototype versions. The Single-Port Memory version supports NAND/NOR, AND/OR, and Invert operations, with a pin count of 28. The Dual-Port Memory version operates in two modes: Mode 1 for standard memory read/write operations and Mode 2 for Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) operations, featuring a pin count of 56 with a quad package.

The development was led by Dr. Kanika, Dr. Nitin Chaturvedi, and Mr. Shubham, under the mentorship of Prof. S. Gurunarayanan and Prof. Chandra Shekhar, a former Director of CEERI who has been with BITS Pilani since 2004.

BITS Pilani has a long-standing history in microelectronics, initiating its Microelectronics degree program in 1988–89. The institute’s electronics education traces back to the M.Sc.(Tech) Electronics program in 1955, with its Electrical Engineering department established in 1946 as part of the Birla College of Engineering.