Digital India RISC-V

Main article: Semiconductors (India market)

History

2022: India launches state program to develop open RISC-V processors

The Government of India has set a deadline for the start of commercial production of domestic microprocessors by December 2023. State Minister of the Union for Electronics and Information Technologies Rajiv Chandrashekhar made this statement on April 27, 2022 during the launch of the Digital India RISC-V microprocessor program.

The Digital India RISC-V (DIR-V) program is aimed at creating future generations of microprocessors that will meet the needs of India's strategic focus on mobility, computing and digitization. The main goal of this program is to create microprocessors of the future in India and around the world and achieve victories in the field of silicon and industrial design by December 2023, he added.

Chandrasekhar noted that the program will also rely on the experience gained by IT Madras and the Center for the Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), which develop two domestic microprocessors Shakti (32 bits) and Vega (64 bits).

Within the framework of DIR-V, a partnership will be established between startups, academic and international companies to make India not only a center of talent in the field of RISC-V for the whole world, but also a supplier of RISC-V SoC (systems on a chip) for servers, mobile devices, cars, IoT and microcontrollers around the world. One of the important milestones I am very focused on is the release of the first commercial Shakti and Vega silicon processors by December 2023 or early 2024.

We want at least a few companies to adapt the design of their products to the DIR-V Shakti and Vega processors by 2023-2024, and when the semiconductor is ready, they will start manufacturing and include these chips in their products. We also believe that over the next year and a half, a partnership between the Shakri and Vega teams and a common DIR-V program with platform companies such as HP, VVDN, Apple, and a large number of companies in the electronic ecosystem will help create design victories around the DIR-V Shakti and Vega product family.

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