India inside Intel chips

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: Three hundred odd people at Intel India have just won a bet with their management and earned themselves a ‘fascinating vacation’. But they are clearly more excited about what they have delivered—end-to-end design of Intel’s first six-core or six brain microprocessor.

It is hard to miss the glint in Intel India president, Praveen Vishakantaiah’s eyes as he counts the long list of firsts. “This is the first time that a microprocessor came to life in a lab in India. Intel had never taken work on 45-nanometre technology outside the US till now. It is also the first time that a chip has been launched on the first design iteration at Intel. I am incredibly proud of the team that delivered India’s first ever microprocessor design.”

The snazzy microprocessor packs 1.9 billion transistors and is smaller than a matchbox. It is expected to strengthen Intel’s position in the highly competitive market of servers oriented at large enterprises. Till now, both Intel and AMD have two and four core chips.

The project came to India about two years ago and finished two months ahead of the schedule. Intel design prowess story, however, goes back to another India-specific project Whitefield, which was aborted three years back to design next-generation Xeon processor for servers. Disappointment was short-lived as the same Bangalore team was assigned the task of designing the six core Xeon processor. It was codenamed Dunnington because it was Dunn (done) in garden town (Bangalore).

The Intel India team planned and executed the complete design activities, including front-end design, pre-silicon logic validation and back-end design. The post-silicon validation, which tests the market readiness and the product-performance, was also undertaken at Intel’s Bangalore facility. The project was broadly divided into sketching a design and then optimising the design to meet all performance and cost targets and finally, a complete simulation of the design.

Praveen, who led the design team, says three steps had to be followed in every phase. First, the design was represented in a high-level language. Next, this was translated into circuits and finally, layout design was readied to send mask to the factory. The first design was completed last year on August 15 coinciding with India completing 60 years of Independence.