The Sargantana chips (lizard in Catalan and Aragonese), the third generation of the first open source processors in Spain, will serve to train the next batch of professionals in the sector. After presenting them this Wednesday at a press conference, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), the entity that has coordinated their development, has made public the design of the devices so that any person or entity can copy them and adapt to your needs.
"We are developing a technology that will allow, in the future, Spain and Europe to design their own increasingly competitive processors, in addition to training future professionals in a sector that will undoubtedly add great value to the production chain," he highlighted in press release, Miquel Moretó, project coordinator. With this training idea in mind, the researchers are talking to 23 Spanish universities to develop teaching materials that facilitate the use of the chip in bachelor's and master's degrees.
The idea is that open source chips, public and without a defined owner, reduce the current dependence on large corporations and contribute to innovation through collaboration between institutions. A good example of this is the diverse consortium that has achieved the development of Sargantana, in which the Computing Research Center of the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico (CIC-IPN), the National Microelectronics Center (CNM-CSIC), and the Catalan universities UPC, UAB, UB and URV.
The chip, which occupies a tiny surface area of less than three square millimeters, uses the free hardware architecture RISC-V (pronounced “Risk Five”), which researchers believe can represent a technological revolution comparable to what Linux brought about for the software. Sargantana “will be vital to guarantee technological sovereignty and maintain European industrial competitiveness, and consolidates the role of the BSC as a pioneer in Europe in the introduction of open source for chip design,” said Mateo Valero, director of the BSC.
Valero's idea is to turn Barcelona into an international reference center in processor design. “We have the talent, technological knowledge and scientific environment necessary for Barcelona and its surroundings to compete with any institution or region in the world,” he stated.
The processor has achieved higher performance than its predecessors, Lagarto and DVINO. “We have improvements in the design itself, and this improves performance by 30-40%. Then, separately, there are improvements in the technological node, which is what reports the most performance improvement. The frequency is much higher, all the components are much better and this makes the chip itself work better,” says Moretó in statements to La Vanguardia.
The device contains a much higher density of transistors – the most basic part of any electronic device – than its predecessors and is capable of carrying out more than a billion instructions in a second. In short, it is faster than previous prototypes. “We are still far from the most competitive technological nodes, but it is a modern technology and we believe it is a very important step forward,” concludes the expert.
Sargantana is an experimental chip, which is not intended to be mounted in any computer. The prototype is part of the process that researchers are following to learn how to develop a competitive processor. “We started in 2019 almost blindly,” explains Moretó, “we have improved a lot, but there is still a long way to go.”
The consortium has already ordered the manufacture of the fourth generation of chips, called Kamaleon, which will integrate specific security, genomics, automotive and task scheduling functions.
Meanwhile, the BSC has begun to work on integrating its technology together with that of the other major continental project, the European Processor Initiative (EPI), to develop a chip prototype closer to a market product that It can eventually be integrated into a computer. To achieve this they have at least five years of work left.
In 2019, when he presented the first generation of Lagarto chips, Miquel Moretó explained to this medium that “to go to the Moon, first one has to learn to launch rockets,” and that the initial prototype was his first ship. Today, “we can't go to the Moon yet, but we are launching bigger rockets. “We are still inside the Earth’s atmosphere, but we are improving very quickly.”
The presentation of Sargantana was held at the BSC facilities, and was attended by Laia Arnal, general director of Knowledge Transfer and Society of the Generalitat of Catalonia. Mateo Valero, director of the research center, and Miquel Moretó, project coordinator, were also present.
The Sargantana project has been financed by the Strategic Transformation Project for the semiconductor sector (PERTE Chip) and with European funds from the FEDER Operational Program of Catalonia 2014-2020. It has also received the support of the Generalitat of Catalonia.
