Ceremorphic tapes out first-of-its-kind 5nm AI supercomputing chip marking another milestone

Founded in April 2020 by Dr Venkat Mattela, Ceremorphic has managed to deliver breakthrough innovation since its inception. Ceremorphic’s newest innovation is the first 5nm supercomputing chip with partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). This chip, a first of its kind out of the Indian Semiconductor manufacturing space, has been designed for unrivalled Energy Efficiency, Performance and Reliability.

“Ceremorphic is the first company to tape out an AI supercomputing chip in the advanced 5nm process node, representing not only a significant accomplishment for our company but also for the India semiconductor industry,” said Dr Venkat Mattela, Founder and CEO of Ceremorphic. “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 added.

In a discussion with CXOtoday, Dr Venkat elaborates –

As the only AI supercomputing chip to solve the high-performance computing needs in reliability, security and power consumption at scale – what is the market for such a chip in India?

The Indian market is up and coming in terms of technological advancements. With segments like Artificial Intelligence Training workloads, Scientific computing and Metaverse processing  leading the tech front, India will start requiring high-performance computers and the supercomputing chip will be an integral part of the process.

The 5nm chip has been designed to target various sectors including data centres, drug discovery and metaverse processes among others. India is also our centre for research and development. That has given us insight into what the market has been like in the Indian semiconductor space and has enabled us to position ourselves better in the market.

When is the new supercomputing chip expected to go into production?

We expect the final chip to be rolled out in 2024 and are currently looking for strategic partners. We, however, have a plan in place for the production and taking the part to the target markets ourselves as well.

Can you provide some insights on the key features of this supercomputing chip? How do these aspects tie up with energy efficiency from the chip?

The Ceremorphic chip contains both digital and analogue circuits, very high speed (64Gbit, PCIe 6.0) and energy efficient connectivity circuits for system level and inter-node communications, multi-thread reliable processor and low power circuits for SoC silicon. Typical reliability engineering involves triple modular redundancy but it becomes prohibitively expensive for designs having thousands of processing units like in Training supercomputer space. Ceremorphic devised multi-thread computing approach for both reliability and security to create the final solution. The key features of the chip include:

• Patented Multi-thread processing macro-architecture, ThreadArch® based RISC –V® processor for proxy processing (2GHz)
• Custom-designed X16 PCIe 6. 0 / CXL 3.0 connectivity interface
• Reliability system components realized in advanced microarchitectures

What are the plans for Ceremorphic’s expansion? Are there any other launches lined up in the near future?

Ceremorphic’s development centre in India currently employs more than 150 hardware and software engineers with plans to grow to 250 by 2023. Earlier this year, Ceremorphic announced a $50 million Series A round funding and their plans to innovate the AI supercomputing space with an energy-efficient, high-performance chip architecture. At Ceremorphic, we currently hold more than 120 patents and are on a constant path of research and innovation.

We have another launch lined up in the next few months related to our new technology offerring and business model.