MeitY announces winners of microprocessor challenge; all details here

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has announced winners of its inaugural Swadeshi Microprocessor Challenge.  

The competition offered access for startups and innovators to two homegrown processors – the Shakti processor by the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) and the Vega processor by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), India. 

A total of over 6,000 applications were received for the Swadeshi Microprocessor Challenge organised by MeitY, of which the ministry today announced 10 total winners.  

Three key winners were chosen, alongside seven others that shared a part of the total prize pool.  

A total funding assistance amounting to Rs 4.4 crore was afforded to the participating finalists. 

From the initial 6,170 teams, 500 were initially selected to participate in the preliminary rounds. From these, the Challenge identified 100 semi-finalists, following which the final winners have been chosen.  

On this note, here’s looking at the 10 winners of the competition, and the projects they built using the Shakti and Vega processing platforms. 

Winner: Vega FCS-FT 

The Vega FCS-FT team used the Vega processor to build what they labelled as a fault-tolerant integrated avionics platform.  

The platform creates an indigenous controller solution for drones made in India, using the open-source instruction-based Vega processing platform. The Team Vega FCS-FT was awarded the winning prize of Rs 35 lakh. 

1st runners-up: HW Design Labs 

The Kerala-based electronic systems design manufacturing (ESDM) startup, which is now about six years old, took home the second prize of Rs 30 lakh.  

The startup has been building indigenous hardware solutions and related software platforms for electronic devices, and used the Shakti processor to build an FM Radio Data System (FM RDS) utility platform. 

2nd runners-up: Cytox 

The third prize of Rs 25 lakh was won by healthcare startup, Cytox. The latter built an indigenous hardware that could facilitate an at-home process for counting blood cells, which in turn can be pivotal in early detection of ailments.  

The startup also used the Shakt processor platform, which was developed by the Reconfigurable Intelligent Systems Engineering (RISE) division at IIT-M, and offers 22nm processors based on an open source microprocessor architecture. 

Others in top 10 

The remaining seven finalists were awarded a cumulative prize of Rs 20 lakh, which has been split among them. The winners include SpectroProcessor for designing a biomedical hardware based on Shakti, QuinProc for home-based blood cell counting based on Shakti, Avrio Energy for its AI-based energy meter based on Vega, Anshashodhak for its nuclear spectroscopy callibrator based on Shakti, 6E Resources for its Vega-based remote sewage monitoring, JayHawks for its Shakti-based geofencing hardware and platform and Astrek Innovations for a lower limb exosuit based on Vega.