Pakistan’s best technology institution Usman Institute of Technology (UIT), have build up the country’s 1st home produced open source microprocessor in Karachi.
The UIT team leveraged the RISC V based open source architecture to produce the said processor that may transform the local tech manufacturing industry.
Support of UIT’s undergraduate engineering and computer science students, faculty, and a couple of international mentors leg behind this remarkable development.
UIT is the only undergraduate institute in Pakistan to be teaching processor designing based on RISC-V in undergraduate program.
UIT’s single cycle RISC-V processor uses industry standard Chisel programming language. The institute is running RV32I processor core on FPGA and future development include complete RISC-V processor and semiconductor chip development by undergraduate students.
Director UIT Dr. Zahir Ali Syed said “We believe in industry academia linkage and the only way to progress our nation is to develop students for cutting edge industry,”
He further said “We are trying to get Pakistan’s share from the 500 billion dollar global semiconductor industry and trying to make our undergraduate students ready to cash in on that market.”
Dr. Rumi Naqvi is one of the mentors on this project as well as UIT’s adjunct faculty member who has 17 years of IC design experience. He started Micro Electronics Research Laboratory (MERL-UIT) in collaboration with Usman Institute of Technology in June 2019.
Some other top names of mentors on this project include Dr. Ali Ahmed who is Assistant Professor and head of MERL at UIT, Engr. Asad Hussain who is making curriculum for undergraduate engineering students, Engr. Farhan who is teaching industry standard Chisel programming language and core development, and Hadir Khan who is a UIT graduate student leading undergraduate students in various classes.