The young techie who is building India's possible answer to Intel and AMD

As a PhD student at IIT-Madras, Neel Gala participated in the ambitious SHAKTI programme; he is now working towards making India self-reliant in chip design

This thirty-year-old young man has a dream and it isn't ordinary. A team member of SHAKTI Processor Systems, the programme run by Indian Institute of Technology, Madras to develop India's own indigenous chips, Neel Gala has a vision to break the monopoly of multinational corporations in this field.

Gala, who is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Chennai-based InCore Semiconductors, has set a clear mission ahead of him to reduce India's dependence on imported microchips.

"Though India houses a quite few facilities owned by global companies engaged in the architecture of microprocessors, the country is typically treated only as a verification or validation or assembly centre," says Gala. "From the research perspective, most universities here offer a simulated environment, which does not give one the real feel of working in chip designing projects."

India's dependence on high-end computer chips and processors for both computer and mobile applications is absolute. While Intel and AMD are the dominant players in high-end computer chips and processors globally, ARM has a major market share in processors used in mobile phones. While the National Policy on Electronics aims to create a globally competitive electronic design and manufacturing industry to meet India's growing needs, the sector is still in its infancy. However, with programmes like SHAKTI, the country has started to take a few baby steps.

"Under SHAKTI, we started working on a lot of these processors. A lot of redesign was done. Eventually, we hit the ball hard enough to be approached by Intel," Gala said. "Simultaneously, we are also exploring using SHAKTI in the atomic energy sector for entities like for Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Nuclear Power Corporation of India. These initiatives have given us a lot of confidence."

The successful booting of Linux by SHAKTI's RISC-V processor last year was another morale-booster for Gala to take the entrepreneurial plunge. "Such an achievement last year prompted us to build a business model out of it (by setting up InCore)," he added.

Gala, who stayed in Dubai for 18 years (his father is a civil engineer there), completed his initial education in the West Asian CITY. After graduating from National Institute of Technology, Warangal, he joined IIT Madras in 2012 for Master’s programme. But, within one year, he became a direct PhD student. "In the first year, I did my internship with one of the tech majors in Bangalore and during that time, I was able to grab a patent and three international publications out of that research. Post that, my professors offered me to do a PhD degree and I preferred to do that," he said.

But his leaning towards the complex world of microprocessors actually started in the second year of his graduation when he did his internship at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. "That is when I got into digital design. I was basically writing validation scripts, validating one of the fast-breeder reactors."

This determination was further strengthened when Gala was selected as a project staff in Professor V Kamakoti's lab in 2010. The SHAKTI programme is implemented under the guidance of Kamakoti, a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT-Madras.

After completing his PhD, Gala had received several job offers from top MNCs. However, he preferred to chart his own path by setting up InCore along with G S Madhusudan, who is a consultant for many of the projects that run at IIT-Madras. Gautam Doshi, another co-founder of InCore, is a former Intel employee with close to 30 years of experience.

"What actually comes out of IIT-Madras is quite raw. So at InCore, we customise it, add our own flavour and make it more production-ready before selling to the customers," Gala said. The one-year old startup already has several IPs in its name while the firm would now majorly focusing on innovations around artificial intelligence (AI), he added.