Indore (Madhya Pradesh): The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Indore has developed a new software tool called AspireHLS that helps engineers design electronic chips used in everyday devices such as smartphones, cameras and music systems faster and with less manual effort.
The product was developed by Prof Anirban Sengupta and his team at the Hardware Security and Reliability Lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering after nearly 10 years of research.
It is now freely and publicly available for students, researchers and companies to use.
Within a short time of its release, the AspireHLS product package, including benchmarks and tutorials, has already been downloaded by users in more than 60 countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa - indicating its growing usefulness among engineers worldwide. Some of these countries include the USA, France, England, Singapore, China, Vietnam, Russia, Spain, Germany, Brazil, the UAE, Poland, Georgia and Japan.
Designing a computer chip is similar to designing a complex piece of machinery: engineers first sketch out how it should work, and the design then has to be translated into a detailed blueprint that a factory can actually manufacture.
Normally, this translation step is slow and requires considerable manual and specialised work.
AspireHLS automates this step. It takes a chip design written by an engineer and automatically converts it into a detailed, ready-to-manufacture circuit blueprint while also working out the best possible balance between two key factors that chip designers have to consider: how much space the chip takes up and how fast it runs.
The tool is particularly useful for devices that need to process large amounts of data quickly, such as those used in signal processing and multimedia systems.
Most tools of this kind are either expensive commercial products or limited academic prototypes that do not offer everything a designer needs in one place.
AspireHLS brings several of these capabilities together and, because it is freely available, gives students and smaller research teams access to tools that were previously difficult to obtain.
Prof Suhas Joshi, Director, IIT Indore, said, "AspireHLS reflects IIT Indore's commitment to developing indigenous technologies with global relevance.
With AspireHLS product package already being downloaded in over 60 countries within a short time of its release, we're seeing exactly that happen.
This is a proud example of research done at IIT Indore going on to serve engineers and students well beyond our own campus, and it reflects the kind of practical, globally relevant innovation we want."
Prof Anirban Sengupta, who led the development of AspireHLS, said, "AspireHLS is a new publicly available end-to-end High-Level Synthesis tool for designing digital hardware systems for data-intensive applications such as DSP and multimedia.
It works with high-level intermediate representations like Data Flow Graphs extracted from C code or transfer functions and offers several unique capabilities that are not available together in other academic or commercial High-Level Synthesis tools."
