India’s ambition to design its own processors has found a natural home in RISC-V, the open and royalty-free instruction set architecture. Unlike proprietary ISAs that require costly licences, RISC-V lets academic and industrial teams build cores freely, modify them for specific workloads, and share the results. For a country intent on reducing dependence on imported silicon intellectual property, this openness is strategically valuable.

Shakti and Vega: two indigenous families

The Shakti programme, developed at IIT Madras, is among the best-known Indian RISC-V efforts. It spans a range of core classes, from small microcontroller-grade designs to more capable application processors intended for compute-heavy tasks. The programme has also produced working silicon fabricated on real process nodes, an important milestone that moves a design from simulation to a tested physical chip.

The Vega series, developed under C-DAC, represents a parallel line of indigenous processors aimed at embedded and general-purpose applications. Together, Shakti and Vega demonstrate that Indian institutions can carry a processor from architectural specification through RTL design, verification, physical implementation and tape-out.

Why open cores matter for skills

The engineering value of these projects extends well beyond the chips themselves. Building a processor exercises the entire VLSI design flow, and the open nature of RISC-V means students and engineers can study, extend and re-implement real cores rather than treating them as black boxes. Typical learning outcomes include:

• Micro-architecture design and pipeline trade-offs
• RTL coding and functional verification
• Synthesis, place-and-route and timing closure
• Software-hardware co-design, including toolchain and compiler awareness

The road ahead

Homegrown cores are unlikely to displace established commercial processors in high-performance markets in the near term. Their significance lies elsewhere: in seeding a domestic ecosystem of processor architects, in giving educational institutions a credible platform, and in supporting national initiatives around trusted and secure hardware. As government-backed manufacturing plans mature, having engineers who understand a core from the ground up becomes a genuine advantage.

For VLSI engineers in India, the rise of indigenous RISC-V cores is a reminder that processor design is no longer a distant, foreign discipline but an accessible field where local skills increasingly shape the outcome.