IIT Indore Develops AspireHLS Tool For Faster Chip Designing

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Indore has developed a software tool called AspireHLS to help engineers design electronic chips faster and with less manual effort.

The tool was developed by Prof Anirban Sengupta and his team at the Hardware Security and Reliability Lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering after nearly 10 years of research.

AspireHLS is now freely and publicly available for students, researchers, and companies to use. Within a short time of its release, the AspireHLS product package has been downloaded by users in more than 60 countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Designing a computer chip is similar to designing a complex piece of machinery. Engineers first sketch out how it should work, and the design then has to be translated into a detailed blueprint that a factory can manufacture.

Normally, this translation step is slow and requires considerable manual and specialized work. AspireHLS automates this step, taking a chip design written by an engineer and automatically converting it into a detailed, ready-to-manufacture circuit blueprint.

It also works out the best possible balance between two key factors that chip designers have to consider: how much space the chip takes up and how fast it runs. The tool is particularly useful for devices that need to process large amounts of data quickly, such as those used in signal processing and multimedia systems.

Most tools of this kind are either expensive commercial products or limited academic prototypes that do not offer everything a designer needs in one place. AspireHLS brings several of these capabilities together and, because it is freely available, gives students and smaller research teams access to tools that were previously difficult to obtain.

Prof Suhas Joshi, Director, IIT Indore, said that AspireHLS reflects the institution's commitment to developing indigenous technologies with global relevance.

Prof Anirban Sengupta, who led the development of AspireHLS, said that the tool is a new publicly available end-to-end High-Level Synthesis tool for designing digital hardware systems for data-intensive applications.

The development of AspireHLS is a significant achievement for IIT Indore, demonstrating the institution's capabilities in research and innovation.

The tool's global reach and adoption are a testament to the institution's commitment to developing technologies that can benefit engineers and students worldwide.

In conclusion, the development of AspireHLS by IIT Indore is a significant milestone in the field of chip designing, making it faster, easier, and more accessible to engineers and students worldwide.