IIT Delhi Develops India’s First Micro-GPU

Researchers at the Electrical Engineering Department of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi developed India’s first working and demonstrable indigenous micro-Graphics Processing Unit (micro-GPU) on 24–25 September 2026. The project was led by M.Tech students Nammi Akash and M. Ravi Teja under Professor Jayadeva and Professor Kaushik Saha.

Micro-GPU

A micro-GPU is a compact graphics processor designed for programmable rendering tasks. The IIT Delhi device used a custom floating-point GPU engine and was implemented entirely in Register Transfer Language (RTL).

Hardware Platform and Design

The micro-GPU was mapped to a Spartan-7 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform. FPGA devices are reconfigurable integrated circuits used for prototyping digital systems and testing processor architectures before fabrication in silicon.

Applications and Development Roadmap

The architecture is described as a scalable programmable graphics processor intellectual property block for embedded systems. Its stated application areas include industrial control displays, e-rickshaw dashboard navigators, and educational e-book readers.

Important Facts for Exams

• Graphics Processing Units are widely used in artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads.
• Register Transfer Language is a hardware description method used in digital circuit design.
• Field Programmable Gate Arrays allow post-manufacturing reconfiguration of logic circuits.
• Semiconductor process nodes such as 65nm are used in chip fabrication and embedded electronics.

Future Architecture Plans

The research team is exploring an 8–16 core vector-style graphics processor architecture with an optimised compiler and software toolchain. The planned migration target is a 65nm ASIC process node for indigenous graphics silicon.