Manu of IIT Gandhinagar

For India to lead the technological renaissance in computer systems engineering, we need to cultivate an army of creators who think not just as consumers, but as builders of future products. In India, most engineers, irrespective of their specialization, pick up software engineering as a career. Hardware is perceived as something very difficult with very few employment opportunities. This has happened as hardware education has remained theoretical and lacks engineering focus. For India to gain leadership in multiple domains like AI, EVs, drones and space requires the presence of a large number of engineers interested in hardware. This can only be achieved by fundamentally rethinking semiconductor pedagogy.

We have launched Project Madhava at IIT Gandhinagar with two goals. First, to build a hands-on curriculum for multiple levels (schools, colleges, polytechnics etc) of learners which provides understanding of building blocks of computers by making learners build successively complex projects. They understand digital logic, IC’s etc by putting working components on breadboards to make functional digital devices like clocks, calculators and 8 bit CPUs which then come together as module level solutions for various domains of strategic importance like batteries and surveillance.

The second goal is to create IPs of microcontrollers that are used in everyday life and in large volumes. For example, lakhs of Arduino boards are sold in India every year, but none of the simple MCUs (Atmega 328p) are designed or manufactured in India. We plan to design, fabricate and test a large number of RISC-V versions of such high volume, low design complexity MCUs and build module level prototypes of products using these designs which can be used as a drop in replacement for current products.

Biography:

Manu Awasthi is an Associate Professor of Practice at IIT Gandhinagar. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Utah and a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT(BHU) Varanasi.

Before joining IIT Gandhinagar, Prof. Awasthi was with the Department of Computer Science at Ashoka University and Director of Infrastructure and Advanced Development at Amuse Labs. Even before that, he spent two years as an Assistant Professor at IIT Gadhinagar, another 2 years with Micron’s Architecture Definition Group (ADG) in Boise, Idaho and three years with Samsung’s Memory Solution Lab in San Jose, California, where he was involved in R&D, evaluation and prototyping of next generation memory and storage systems. He has served on program committees of many conferences, was awarded the Early Career Research Award (ECRA) by Science and Education Research Board (SERB), a Research Fellowship by IIT Gandhinagar and a Teaching Fellowship by the University of Utah. He is the co-author of two best paper award winning publications.

Email:

Address:IIT Gandhinagar, , Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India, 382005