Ceremorphic, a US-based chip design company with a development centre in India, has taped out its first 5 nanometer (nm) chip with its foundry partner TSMC, marking an important milestone for the Indian semiconductor industry.
The chip delivers the performance required for next-generation applications such as artificial intelligence model training, HPC (high-performance computing), drug discovery and metaverse processing.
“Ceremorphic is the first company to tape out an AI supercomputing chip in the advanced 5 nm process node, representing not only a significant accomplishment for our company but also for the India semiconductor industry,” said Venkat Mattela, Founder and Chief Executive officer of Ceremorphic.
Showcasing the chip’s design, he said the chip will have good use cases in areas like supercomputing, datacentres, robotics and drug discovery. “The talent pool, expertise and resulting innovation coming from India has once again proven to be world-class and this design achievement positions us well for our next phase of growth and expansion,” he said.
The final chip will be rolled out in 2024 after releasing yet another chip a few months later.
Founded in 2020, the US-based company began its work in 2017 as part of Venkat’s previous venture Redpine Signals, whose wireless assets (technology, SoC product, Team, Tier1 customers and revenue) were sold to Silicon Labs for $308 million in 2020.
It raised $50 million in Series-A. Ceremorphic’s development centre in India employs over 150 hardware and software engineers. It said it will hire 100 more in the next one year.
Reliable computing
“With this announcement, the AI industry just got one step closer to finally addressing today’s critical challenges through reliable performance computing,” said Subhasish Mitra, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University.