Bangalore based co builds app specific processor

Recently, Nvidia unveiled a platform for gaming called Project Shield. It had an interesting feature. The console could sync with a PC running on its Tegra graphics processing unit and could beam the game from your PC onto your television. 

This marks a shift in how traditional hardware functions are changing. Traditionally, graphic cards were processors whose sole function was to ensure that graphics were processed on them rather than giving the load to the PC's processor. The PC's processor would then be able to co-ordinate the non-graphics part of the software. With Project Shield, the graphic card takes on some of the processing cores on the hardware to play the game on your TV. 
Bangalore-based Morphing Machines is working on similar technology. Their platform called Redefine can be used to create highly reconfigurable, massively parallel processors, and these can be used for applications like high-definition video processing, avionics, large mathematical applications and cryptography. Or they could be used to make heterogeneous multi-core processors which can be used to make custom processor cores and compilers for applications like face recognition. 

"Redefine's cores are not designed like ARM's cores or Intel's cores, which have no character, where the software does the job and the processor just does general computing. In Redefine's processors, we try to make it application domain specific," says Chandan Haldar, founder and director of Morphing Machines. The company was founded in 2006 and was one of the first companies to be incubated by the IISc's Society of Innovation and Design. The team consists of a group of distinguished IIT and IISc alumni. Haldar held senior technical and management positions at Siemens , Sun Microsystems, Lucent Technologies and AOL. 

"These platforms can be equated with special purpose hardware like ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) that accelerates certain computations specific to an application," Haldar adds. An ASIC is an integrated circuit customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use. For example, a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder is an ASIC and offers higher performance as they are dedicated to only one purpose. 

Redefine's platforms, which are customized to specific applications, can perform applications like ASICs and also allow a certain amount of resources for general purpose computing. They are also reconfigurable. 

The company has a number of customers, including DRDO that uses it for cryptography and high-definition video encoding.