Making chips in our missiles!

At first glance, you wouldn’t believe that B.H.V.S. Narayana Murthy was a weapons system genius who has helped take India’s missile defence system into the digital world. The soft-spoken scientist, who is associate director at the Research Centre Imarat (RCI) and also its technology director, recently won the Astronautical Society of India’s award for Rocketry and Related Technologies.

Murthy, who was awarded for his work on on-board computer (OBC) systems and for developing India’s first OBC chip system, explains, “A missile is basically a guided rocket. We have to feed the correct longitude and latitude, parameters, control inertial navigation system, trajectory calculations, controlling the missile… all of this run on the OBC.”

Born in West Godavari, Murthy attended schools in Nellore and Guntur and went on to graduate from NIT Warangal with a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering in 1985.

After joining the DRDO in Pune for an electronics fellowship course the next year, he was picked up by the DRDL in 1987 and began working on OBCs from then on.

“At that time Dr Abdul Kalam was the director and I reported to him,” Narayana remembers, “For the first Agni missile launch, we were at the test facility for more than a month, working till about 2 am every day. At that time too, Kalam used to come work with us.”

He adds that the same culture continues even today, with junior level scientists free to interact with directors any time they want.

Most of Murthy’s work comprises getting each sub-system of the missile programme to work on one chip that controls them all. “It takes inputs from the navigational system and calculates the optimal trajectory for the missile to move. It also controls stage separation in multi-stage vehicles and time-based mission events and records post launch data too.”

He had to work on getting the chip to work in every possible condition, especially in varying temperatures. With around 200 launches for missiles systems like the Agni, Brahmos and Aakash, Narayana says he and his team spent many a night fine-tuning each system’s OBC.

Currently working on “smart bombs” that use these chips to correct trajectories mid-air, making them lethal for even moving targets, Narayana says that the trend of “small is better” applies to weapons systems too. “We do the same, to increase the lethality and payload of weapons,” he says, adding, “We’re trying to make on-board avionics, with navigation systems, telemetry, seekers, all onto one modular set.”