TSU Protocol: An Open-Source RISC-V NPU Standard for Edge AI Inference

The Problem

AI inference is increasingly moving to the edge, but the hardware landscape is fragmented. Proprietary NPUs lock you into ecosystems. General-purpose CPUs burn too much power. Existing open-source hardware projects lack a coherent standard for AI-specific compute.

TSU Protocol is our answer: an open, royalty-free hardware standard built on RISC-V with 16 custom Agent-extended instructions, purpose-designed for LLM inference at the edge.

Architecture

TSU extends the RISC-V RV64 ISA with hardware instructions for:

• MatMul & Attention — The core operations of transformer models, as single-cycle hardware ops
• Softmax & RMSNorm — Normalization layers accelerated in silicon
• SiLU & RoPE — Activation and positional encoding, offloaded from software
• Agent Secure Enclave — Hardware-isolated execution environment for agent runtimes
• Mesh Network — On-chip interconnect for multi-core scaling

Three Tiers

Tier	Power	Precision	BOM	Target
TSU-M1	5W	INT8	$150	Edge/IoT sensors
TSU-M2	20W	FP16/INT8	$300	On-device AI, robots
TSU-M3	45W	FP16/BF16	$550	Enterprise edge servers

Performance Estimates

• TSU-M1: ~8 TOPS INT8 — sufficient for running 1-2B parameter models
• TSU-M2: ~40 TOPS INT8 / ~20 TFLOPS FP16 — runs 7B models comfortably
• TSU-M3: ~120 TOPS INT8 / ~60 TFLOPS FP16 — multiple concurrent 7B-13B models

Open Source. Community-Governed.

Everything is in the open:

• ISA specification: Verilog RTL, instruction encoding, and microarchitecture
• DAO governance: Funding and roadmap decisions made by the community
• Manufacturing-ready: Designed for MPW shuttle runs on 28nm/22nm processes

Current Status

We are pre-tapeout, seeking $50K-$200K in community funding to cover our first MPW run. All contributions are DAO-governed — funds are released transparently on milestone votes.

GitHub: https://github.com/JesesePU/tsu-protocol
Website: https://landing-ivory-theta.vercel.app
Donate (TRC-20 USDT): TU8NBT5iGyMNkLwWmWmgy7tFMbKnafLHcu

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TSU Protocol is developed anonymously — following the Satoshi path from whitepaper to DAO to hardware. No company. No VC. Just code, community, and silicon.