RISC-V processor designed by five Chinese university students successfully fabricated

Five undergraduates from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences led the design of a 64-bit RISC-V processor that became their graduation project, according to China Youth Daily.

The 64-bit RISC-V processor SoC, called "NutShell," was designed last year and is based on the 110nm process of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), the biggest chipmaker on the Chinese mainland.

The SoC has been successfully taped out and is capable of running Linux as well as UCAS-Core, an operating system the students made themselves.

All five graduates will be attending graduate school at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, "to participate in a more challenging project to develop a design for a high-performance chaotic multi-emission RISC-V processor core.”

"Processor chips are recognized as the crown jewel of the chip industry, with high design complexity and difficulty," said Sun Ninghui, dean of the School of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

There is a serious shortage of processor chip design talent in China, and it is an urgent challenge to accelerate the scale and speed of training of such talent, Sun said.

In response to the processor design talent crisis, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences launched the "One Life One Chip" program in August 2019, with the goal of training undergraduates to design processor chips and complete tape out with solid theoretical and practical experience.

(The NutShell SoC)

(The NutShell SoC)