Software-Driven Hardware Design: IBM’s Bhavesh Budhabhatti on Accelerating Computing

IBM India’s VLSI Team Drives Innovation in Software-Driven Hardware Design and Power11 Chip Development

In an exclusive interview at DVCon India 2025, Bhavesh Budhabhatti, Director of Enterprise Systems Development at IBM’s India System Development Lab (ISDL) in Bangalore, shared insights into the transformative role of software-driven hardware design and the groundbreaking work of IBM’s India VLSI team. Budhabhatti, a seasoned leader in chip design, discussed how IBM is leveraging software algorithms to accelerate computing and revealed details about the development of the Power11 microprocessor, designed entirely by the Indian team to power future enterprise systems, particularly in banking.

Software-Driven Hardware: Accelerating the Digital World  
As computing demands surge in today’s digital era, Budhabhatti emphasized the growing importance of software-driven hardware design. “Computing is becoming the backbone of everything,” he noted, pointing out that software workloads, particularly in areas like security and cryptography, consume significant processing power. By translating time-intensive software algorithms into hardware, IBM achieves dramatic performance improvements. “Something that takes days can be reduced to minutes,” Budhabhatti explained.  

This approach involves analyzing th...