01
FPGA Based Hardware Accelerators
Domain-specific accelerators for deep learning and real-time workloads on FPGA and SoC platforms.
Intelligent Integrated Circuits and Systems (I²CS) — VLSI, Chip Design & FPGA Research Lab at IIIT Kottayam
IIIT Kottayam · Research Lab
ITC India Hackathon - Winners
Adithya R Prabhu, Alan Thomas Paul, Niranjan K S, Kevin Jose - "Observability-based functional fault modeling for RISC-V" - Bengaluru, July 2026
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01 About I²CS Research Lab
Intelligent Integrated Circuits and Systems
The Intelligent Integrated Circuits and Systems (I²CS) Research Lab at the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Kottayam, Kerala, India conducts research in VLSI & Chip Design, Hardware Accelerators, Approximate Computing, Hardware Security, and FPGA-Based Edge-AI Systems.
Supported by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY Chips to Startup — C2S), DST NM-ICPS (IIT Palakkad IPTIF), KSCSTE, and the Indo-German Science & Technology Centre (IGSTC WISER), our researchers and VLSI research interns build energy-efficient silicon and reconfigurable prototypes using commercial Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens EDA flows alongside Microchip PolarFire SoC, AMD-Xilinx Zynq/PYNQ-Z2, and indigenous C-DAC VEGA RISC-V platforms. Explore our funded projects & patents, 100+ IEEE/ACM/Springer publications, and research team.
News & Achievements
Congratulations to Amritha Anujan (BTech ECE 2022-2026) for securing admissions to Master of Engineering (MEng) program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley for Fall 2026, with specialization in Physical Electronics and Integrated Circuits.
Project Proposal selected for funding in the WISER Call, by Indo-German Science & Technology Centre (IGSTC), established by DST, Govt of India and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Government of Germany. PI: Dr. Kala S, Collaborator: Prof.(Dr.) Akash Kumar (Chaired Professor of Processor Design, Ruhr Universitat Bochum (RUB), Germany (Sanctioned Amount :39 Lakhs)
Congratulations to I²CS Teams for Test Conference (ITC) India Hackathon First Prize and Third Prize !!
Congratulations to I²CS Team for Microchip VLSI Design Contest Award at VLSID 2026, Pune, for the project titled "AI-Based Defect Detection and Smart Rejection for Industrial Automation on PolarFire" !!
Congratulations to Rohith George Ninan on securing an offer from RWTH Aachen University, Germany, for Masters in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology with a specialization in Microelectronics!!
Congratulations to Keerthana (B.Tech 2021-2025) for receiving offer for MSc in Computer and Embedded Systems Engineering at TU Delft !!
Congratulations to Amritha (B.Tech ECE 2022-2026) for Internship at University of Southern California (USC) through IUSSTF Viterbi internship, in VLSI Design !!
Congratulation to Niranjan K S and Alan Thomas Paul for their paper in IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI) 2026
02 What we do
Research Areas
Six focus areas - each combining dedicated toolchains, funded projects and student theses.
02
VLSI & Chip Design
Low-power digital and mixed-signal IC design - architecture, RTL, verification and implementation.
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Approximate Computing
Energy-efficient arithmetic: approximate multipliers, compressors and precision-scalable datapaths.
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Hardware Security
Trustworthy silicon - hardware security primitives, Post Quantum Cryptography, intellectual-property protection and secure SoCs.
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Edge Computing & FPGA
Rapid prototyping and embedded system development on edge including Raspberry-Pi, NVIDIA Jetson and MPSoCs.
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Intelligent Systems and UAVs
Computer vision, signal processing and edge-AI applications deployed on custom hardware.
02BInside I²CS
Featured videos
Lab tour, Indo-German collaboration, and undergraduate research in action.
I²CS Research Lab - full tour
Walk through the lab at IIIT Kottayam.
Dr. Kala S × IGSTC - WISER feature
Dr. Kala S, WISER (Women Involvement in Science and Engineering Research) Awardee, featured by the Indo-German Science & Technology Centre (IGSTC) during the International Day of Women and Girls in Science celebrations. Hosted by Prof. Dr. Akash Kumar, Chair of Embedded Systems, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, for a joint R&D project on hardware acceleration of sparse neural networks - a collaboration between DST, Govt. of India and BMBF, Govt. of Germany.
YOLO on PYNQ-Z2 - real-time object detection
Adithya R Prabhu & Kevin Jose - B.Tech ECE 3rd year - guided by Dr. Kala S
Real-time YOLO object detection on PYNQ-Z2 FPGA for defence applications - by B.Tech ECE 3rd-year students Adithya R Prabhu & Kevin Jose, guided by Dr. Kala S. A glimpse of hands-on, mentor-driven undergraduate research at I²CS.
AI-Based Defect Detection & Smart Rejection
Joel Dan Philip, Shravan Narayan Sunil, Amrut Ayan Gulawani, Amritha Anujan (BTech ECE 4th Year) - guided by Dr. Kala S
AI-based defect detection and smart rejection system for industrial automation.
I²CS · IIIT Kottayam
What people say about our lab
SRM Institute of Science and Technology
Harshitha
I²CS Intern
“My time at the I²CS internship gave me an opportunity to research and design hybrid machine learning models. Collaborating closely with the research scholars of the lab helped me grow as a researcher. Our work resulted in a paper publication at the ISENSE 2026 conference.”
Muthoot Institute of Technology and Science Kochi
Vivek
I²CS Intern
“My two-month research internship at IIIT Kottayam was on the design of a pipelined FIR filter using a MAC unit, developed in Verilog HDL. This work resulted in the IEEE publication titled "Effect of Quantization on Performance of FIR Filter,” published in IEEE Xplore as part of the 2026 IEEE International Conference RECCAP 2026, held at IIT Palakkad.”
PUDUCHERRY TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY
K. Shyam Chandra
I²CS Intern
“My internship at the I2CS Research Lab in the title "Study of Activation functions in Neural Networs" gave me real exposure to cutting-edge research in hardware architectures for edge AI. Working with dedicated mentors and fellow researchers, I exchanged ideas freely and sharpened my technical skills. The experience led to our paper titled "Hardware Implementation of Activation Functions for Neural Networks on FPGA", published and presented at IEEE RECCAP 2026.”
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Members & alumni
95
Publications
46
Events & talks
1
Patents filed
03News
Latest News
Funding wins, contest results, admissions and internships.
Winners of 10th International Test Conference (ITC) India Hackathon (i) First Prize winners: Shaun Sebastian, Sanjay S, Nishanth, Gouri S…
Read more in Student AchievementsCongratulations to Amritha Anujan (BTech ECE 2022-2026) for securing admissions to Master of Engineering (MEng) program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley for Fall 2026, with specialization in Physical Electronics and Integrated Circuits.
Read more in Student AchievementsCongratulations to Joel Dan Philip (BTech ECE 2023-2027) for Best Paper Award at 29th Int'l Symposium on VLSI Design and Test (VDAT) 2025,…
Read more in Student AchievementsBootcamp on FPGA Prototyping and Hardware Acceleration, June 22-26, 2026
Read more in Events OrganizedWinners of VLSI Design Contest (Microchip) at 39th VLSI Design Conference 2026, Pune ! Congratulations to Joel Dan Philip, Shravan Narayan…
Read more in Student AchievementsWorkshop on "Demonstration of AI/ML on FPGA", on December 5, 2024
Read more in Events Organized05Gallery
Photo Gallery
06 Get in touch
Let's build the next chip together
Prospective students, academic collaborators and industry partners are welcome to write to us about internships, funded projects and joint research.
i2cs@iiitkottayam.ac.in