When Linus Torvalds created the open source operating system Linux in 1991, it threatened Microsoft's business because Linux was an alternative to Windows, one of its core products. 

The open source nature of Linux has enabled developers around the world to contribute to its development, resulting in a powerful and versatile operating system. Secondly, Linux's stability, security and scalability make it suitable for a wide range of applications, from personal computers to servers and embedded devices.

It has played an important role in the open source software movement, even prompting former Microsoft Steve Balmer to call Linux a "cancer".

Now we're seeing a similar trend in the RISC-V hardware space, which is an Open Standard Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) designed to be license- and royalty-free, allowing anyone to use, develop, manufacture or sell RISC-V chips and software.

RISC-V is a 2010 project of the Parallel Computing Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, and is challenging Intel's x86 and ARM architectures. 

For example, a recent report from Next Platform indicates that Meta is transitioning from traditional CPUs to RISC-based components. This shift is attributed to the efficacy, enhanced performance, reduced latency, and adaptability to various workloads that RISC-V offers.

At the same time, India recognizes the huge potential of RISC-V and sees it as a catalyst for building a strong chip design ecosystem in the country.

To achieve this goal, the Government of India launched the Digital RISC-V Initiative (DIR-V) in April 2022, which aims to facilitate the development of next-generation microprocessors in India and position the country as a globally significant RISC center of V expertise.

Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar, who has worked as a chip designer, has also been actively involved in promoting and supporting the RISC-V architecture. 

"Our ambition as a country is that we have hundreds and hundreds of engineers that we will master and be a global leader but certainly amongst the world's leading countries in terms of spreading and harnessing the ability and capacity to create innovations around the technology. the RISC V and DIR V family of chips and systems. The Government of India is fully committed to making DIR-V the Indian ISA (Instruction Set Architecture)," the minister said.

India considers chip design as one of its core strengths and is actively involved in the design of computing systems in various domains, including computing, industrial IoT, automotive, telecom and wireless, and strategic technologies. the DIR-V processor is poised to drive systems in these diverse domains, bringing in healthy competition to other processor-based systems.

"RISC-V is a tool or framework that allows us to innovate rapidly to meet the demand for well-designed chips. The fact that it is open source allows us to choose between different extensions and implementations while remaining compatible with clearly defined standards." Shashwath TR, co-founder and CEO of Mindgrove Technologies, told AIM .

However, in order to build a strong RISC-V ecosystem in India, the country needs more companies to enter the space and increased funding. In addition, the country needs to develop a workforce that specializes in RISC-V architectures.

The DIR-V program aims to create more than 10,000 jobs over the next five years. In addition, "We need more companies working on different aspects, including silicon and related areas such as verification, core and peripheral IP, physical design, etc., across every vertical relevant to India," Shashwath said.

To sustain the ecosystem, India also needs different parties to build motherboards, development tools and software aspects such as compilers, debuggers, IDEs and so on. 

In addition, RISC-V and related specifications are developed, approved and maintained by RISC-V International, which has a diverse membership base of industry leaders, academic institutions, startups and individuals. It has more than 3,000 members, including major semiconductor companies, software providers and system integrators from 70 countries.

RISC-V International needs to have a strong presence at the decision-making level in order to get India's concerns addressed as a top priority.

"At the end of the day, we need to see massive adoption by our users - companies and brands that build products based on our chips - and that comes down to building compelling chips that they are happy to put into such products," Shashwath said.

Nonetheless, the government's focus on RISC-V does offer Indian startups an opportunity to innovate and achieve the goals of the DIR-V program. Because of its open source nature, it allows startups and entrepreneurs to build their own products without having to pay expensive license fees. 

This openness provides Indian startups with the flexibility to innovate and customize chip designs according to their specific requirements. Indian startups can utilize RISC-V to develop homegrown chip designs, contributing to the self-reliance of semiconductor technology in the country while serving global customers.

"The fact that RISC-V is open, widely adopted by the industry, and built on decades of microprocessor building experience makes it a compelling standard to watch. 

Not only is it much cheaper than using a traditional ISA, but our designers have access to innovative designs and microarchitectures, software and tools to get up and running," said Shashwath.

Mindgrove's first few products are based on the RISC-V Shakti C-Class processor developed at IIT's RISE Lab in Madras, Shashwath said. 

Gani Subramaniam, a senior partner at Celesta Capital, previously told AIM that RISC-V is driving the creation of new startups in India and that more and more RISC-V startups are getting funded in India.

Chandrasekhar also emphasized that startups such as Mindgrove Technologies, Ventana MicroSystems, Esperanto Technologies, InCore Semiconductors and Morphing Machines are already targeting the DIR V ecosystem have emerged. The government is also considering acquiring stakes in these companies to nurture startups in the space.

A more open architecture is more secure because it allows independent researchers to red team it and find all the holes that need to be filled. The efforts of independent contributors have made Linux a very secure system. 

"RISC-V benefits from the same philosophy and there is a vibrant security community around RISC-V. In fact, the birth story of Shakti is exactly that - the team at IIT-M was looking for an architecture to do security research and so on. Closed source software didn't allow them to do that without some limitations, so Shakti was born," adds Shashwath.