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