The government on April 27 announced the launch of the Digital India RISC-V (DIR-V) programme to ramp up microprocessor generation by December 2023.
Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar mentioned that DIR-V will see partnerships between startups, academia, and multinationals.
Chandrasekhar reminisced his early days as x-86 processor chip designer at Intel and mentioned that many new processor architectures have gone through an initial period of ferment characterised by waves of innovations. At some point, they all settled on a dominant design.
"ARM and x-86 are two such instruction set architectures- one of which is licensed and the other is sold, where industry consolidated in earlier decades. However, RISC-V has emerged as a strong alternative to them in the last decade, having no licensing encumbrances, enabling its adoption by one and all in semiconductor industry, at different complexity levels for various design purposes," he said.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT is planning to join the RISC-V International as a premiere board member to collaborate, contribute and advocate India’s expertise to other global RISC-V leaders.
