New Delhi, Sept 12

By IDI

Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in association with Ministry of Defence, on Friday, released a tender for locally designed half a million secure system on chips (SoC) out of which 10 per cent chips are for defence systems in military role.

“With a view to facilitate indigenous design and manufacture of secure semiconductor devices, took up an initiative (hereinafter called Project) to provide ‘Deployment Linked Incentive (DLI)’ against deployment of designated number of SoCs to enable availability of secure semiconductor devices from indigenous sources,” the request for proposal (RFP) said.

The document “seeks participation of Indian companies working in the area of design and manufacture of Semiconductor devices to “Indigenously Design, Develop, Manufacture, Validate and Deploy Secure Systems on Chips using Indian Owned Processors based on Open Source ISA(Instruction Set Architecture).”

“The major design IPs ie Processor, Secure Boot and Security IPs of such processors are to be owned by Indian entities. This is expected to yield at least 50 per cent of indigenous content by value and ownership of all security related and unhindered utility of SoCs by Indian companies,” it added.

According to the RFP, a family of four such SoCs, named Bharat Secure Chips (BSC-1, BSC-2, BSC-3 & BSC-4), developed in two phases of the project, would cover the defence requirements to large extent. The SoC requirement of defence ranges from “low-end embedded system to server class computing systems.”

The family of SoCs is expected to be fullfil the requirements of semiconductors in various commercial products. “The combined volume is being considered for economic viability of the project and also to extend the gains from this initiative to the commercial segment,” the RFP said.

From the signing of the contract, the contractor is expected to take three and half (31 /2) years for BSC-1 and Four years for BSC- 2. “Two years from successful development and validation of production grade BSC-1 and BSC-2 SoCs each. Further, deployment of designated number of each SoCs in next two years @ 25% every 6 months commencing latest from the 24th month after the date of contract for BSC-1 and 30th month for BSC-2. Early completion of Deployment will carry defined incentives,” it explained.

The IP for the SoCs would rest with the contractor. The bids are to be submitted by November 23.