TSU Protocol: Open-Source RISC-V NPU — Outreach Wave 4 Update (1778261391)

#riscv #ai #opensource #hardware

TSU Protocol: Open-Source RISC-V NPUs for Edge AI

The Problem

Edge AI inference is dominated by proprietary hardware (Apple Neural Engine, Qualcomm Hexagon, Google TPU). There is no open-source alternative for running AI models on edge devices without vendor lock-in.

Our Solution: TSU Protocol

TSU Protocol is an anonymous, open-source hardware architecture standard for RISC-V-based Neural Processing Units (NPUs). We extend the RV64 ISA with 16 custom AI instructions for matrix multiply, convolution, activation functions, and pooling.

Three Tiers

Tier	Power	TOPS	Target Node	Target Price
TSU-1	5W	8	180nm	$150
TSU-2	20W	40	28nm	$300
TSU-3	45W	120	22nm/12nm	$550

Current Status

✅ Architecture specification complete
✅ RTL design in progress (Verilog)
✅ FPGA validation pipeline designed
🔄 Seeking MPW tape-out sponsorship

Our Outreach Campaign

We've reached out to over 100+ tech companies across AI/ML frameworks, chip design, cloud infrastructure, and blockchain ecosystems. Our latest wave targeted:

AI/ML Platforms: LlamaIndex, AutoGPT, Ollama, vLLM, Together AI, Weights & Biases, Gradio, Streamlit, Jupyter
Hardware & Chip Design: RISC-V International, CHIPS Alliance, lowRISC/OpenTitan, Google/XLS, AMD/ROCm
Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Docker, Nginx, Redis, Hugging Face JS
Previously: OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta/PyTorch, NVIDIA, Apple, Cloudflare, AMD, Hugging Face, DeepMind, Tencent, Baidu, Xiaomi, DJI, Bilibili, and 30+ Wall Street firms

Why Invest in Open Silicon?

No Company — We're a DAO, not a corporation. No exit strategy.
Open-Source — Verilog RTL, MIT license. Transparent on-chain.
RISC-V Ecosystem — Compatible with existing RISC-V toolchains.
Tape-Out Ready — RTL optimized for 28nm/22nm.

How You Can Help

💰 Sponsorship ($50K-$200K USDT)

Sponsor our first MPW tape-out. Funds go to mask fabrication, EDA tools, and testing.

👨‍💻 Code Contributions

Verilog RTL for NPU cores
LLVM backend for custom instructions
Linux/RISC-V driver development

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