Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said the DIR-V will catalyze India’s semiconductor startups, it is a part of Prime Minsiter Narendra Modi’s mission of making India a semiconductor nation.

The Digital India RISC-V (DIR-V) program for next generation Microprocessors to achieve commercial silicon & Design wins by December’2023 was launched on Wednesday, he said.

The DIR-V Will Catalyze India’s Semiconductor Startups, he said.
The DIR-V will see partnerships between Startups, Academia & Global Majors, and prove to be a RISC-V Talent Hub for World.

The India through MeitY set to take Premiere Board Membership of RISC-V International to collaborate, contribute and advocate India’s expertise with the RISC-V leaders of the world, he said.

As one of the concrete steps towards realizing the ambition of self-reliance and a momentous stride towards “Atmanirbhar Bharat”, Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar announced today Digital India RISC-V Microprocessor (DIR-V) Program with an overall aim to enable creation of Microprocessors for the future in India, for the world and achieve industry-grade silicon & Design wins by December’2023.

While setting the aggressive milestones for commercial silicon of SHAKTI & VEGA and their design wins by December 2023, Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar mentioned that DIR-V will see partnerships between Startups, Academia & Multinationals, to make India not only a RISC-V Talent Hub for the World but also supplier of RISC-V SoC (System on Chips) for Servers, Mobile devices, Automotive, IoT & Microcontrollers across the globe.

Reminiscing his early days as x-86 processor chip designer at Intel, Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar mentioned that many new processor architectures have gone through an initial period of ferment characterized by waves of innovations. At some point, however, they all settled on a dominant design. ARM and x-86 are two such instruction set architectures- one of which is licensed and other is sold, where industry consolidated in earlier decades. However, RISC-V has emerged as a strong alternative to them in last decade, having no licensing encumbrances, enabling its adoption by one and all in semiconductor industry, at different complexity levels for various design purposes.