Computer science research firm C-DAC to develop India's first chip: Report

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), one of India's computer science research organisations that is developing supercomputers, is creating the country's first homegrown chip and an exascale computing system, a report in The Economic Times stated.

This will allow the company to design its own solutions for a range of applications, the report added.

Besides these, C-DAC is also creating processors for image processing, smart energy metres and is also designing a 64-bit quad-core microprocessor, said the report.

Further, the firm is working to set up systems and applications in areas such as artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, natural language processing and speech synthesis in Indic languages.

The organisation has also developed some applications around blockchain as well, the business daily reported.

"We have created our own distributed ledger technology which we're currently using for a land records project in Andhra Pradesh. This would also be useful in defence and strategic applications where security is important," Hemant Darbari, director general of C-DAC, was quoted as telling ET.

Interestingly, last year C-DAC had said that India would get its own supercomputer by the end of December under the government's Rs 4,500-crore National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).

The mission, launched in 2015, aims to install about 70 supercomputers over seven years across various academic and research institutions. The project is being spearheaded by C-DAC and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

C-DAC is also working on another project that uses sensors to send information about plant health and pests to farmers.