Celebrating Pakistan’s First Open Source RISC-V based System on Chip

Celebrating Pakistan’s First Open Source RISC-V based System on Chip (5th March, 2022)
President of Pakistan Dr. Arif Alvi – Visited UIT University and Congratulate Micro Electronics Research Lab – MERL and its team for designing Pakistan’s First Open-Source RISC-V based System on Chips (Ibtida and Ghazi SoC).
“Chip manufacturing will be a 1.3 trillion industry by 2030 and the IT sector will be a multi-billion-dollar industry in the near future which requires more than 80 million graduates in the IT sector. UIT University has done a great job by developing Pakistan’s first open-source RISC-V based microprocessor and they have done a tremendous job in filling the huge gap in the IT industry”, President said while appreciating the performance of MERL-UIT.
On the occasion, Chairman Silicon Federation, Dr. Naveed Sherwani said “The forty Advance Training Institutes would be set up all over Pakistan to train people in the field of Chip designing and Verification and UIT is the only university in Pakistan that has started manufacturing a chip in a small lab and showed great results”.
Dr. Roomi Naqvi appreciated the team and said “The MERL chapters in Pakistan have been my mission since 2008, but only UITU adopted it in 2019 and within two year we became the 1st one who designed Pakistan’s First RISC-V based SoCs. We are planning to launch 10 MERLs across Pakistan which will work on the top cutting edge technologies”.
Ibtida and Ghazi SoCs are designed by Hadir Khan, Zain Rizwan, Wajeh Hasan, Aireen Amir, Sajjad Ahmed, and Zeeshan Rafique.
Gracias! Dr. Roomi Naqvi, Dr. Ali Ahmed Ansari, Engr. Farhan Ahmed, Engr. Asad Jaffri for leading and mentoring us, without your devotion and trust this won’t be achievable.