We all know about open-source software, but off-late open-source hardware has been causing quite a stir and India has been quick to take notice. This was also seen at the recent FutureDesign roadshow held in Bangalore, where Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrashekar announced, “India will be the RISC-V [an open-source hardware architecture] talent hub for the world.” 

Defining open-source hardware

“Openness in this particular vertical (of processor design) is absolutely necessary. The monopoly that once existed was no longer accepted by companies and communities anymore… Forget about building x86 in India, forget about building ARM in India, here is a chance to make a leapfrog into the next-generation of processors,” said Neel Gala, founder of Incore Semiconductors. 

This is what open-source architectures like RISC-V are set out to do. They allow vendors in the ecosystem to customise designs to their unique specifications without being bound by royalty fees imposed by third-party vendors. Sravan Kundojjala, principal industry analyst at Strategy Analytics, maintains that “RISC-V will potentially enable developers to design more efficient and cheaper chips than ARM-based design.” 

The ARM ecosystem has two tiers – standard and architectural, with royalty fees involved, whereas, when it comes to RISC-V, he adds, “everyone in the ecosystem holds an architectural licence.”

Explaining how it democratises chip development, Deepak Shapeti, co-CEO at Morphing Machines, a fabless semiconductor startup, said, “Domain Specific Architectures (DSA) [a term referring to customisable chips] are taking over from general purpose processors, as the value, performance, power consumption, and flexibility they offer for a specific use case cannot be matched by general purpose processors.” 

RISC-V driving India’s growth

RISC-V will level the field for everyone. Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) processors have the issue of not being specific to the problem being solved. As a result, in most cases, Shapeti notes, “solutions using COTS will end up nonstarters for reasons of cost, performance, power, or related parameters.”

So, for example, if an entrepreneur/organisation wants a solution for a specific problem – say remote telemedicine with AI in tertiary health care centres in India – they no longer have to depend on COTS. Shapeti proposes a straightforward solution to this problem using RISC-V. It is simply to utilise RV32-IMFV, an instruction set from RISC-V, along with an open-source hardware blueprint (RTL/GDS-II), to start off a development process of creating a custom chip at a silicon cost of under 50 dollars. 

India’s RISC-V strategy – which has also been to build a surrounding semiconductor ecosystem – will give a major boost to home-grown chip design and development. 

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has built a supporting ecosystem with the soon-to-be-operational ChipIN, which will further bolster India’s mission of making chips for the world. 

ChipIN centre offers facilities from design to fabrication support in Multi Project Wafer (MPW) by enabling access to SCL and overseas foundries. This way, ChipIN will act as a one-step design centre for chip designers across the country. The services offered under ChipIN include EDA tools, design flow training, multi-project wafer (MPW) fabrication services, and virtual prototyping hardware lab. The program will allow designers to get capacity in the fab to manufacture their prototype chip. 

Furthermore, the India DataSets Program – which is set to launch in March 2023 – will also catalyse intelligent compute, AI compute, and the device system design ecosystem. 

RISC-V Needs India

“It is not that India needs RISC-V… it is RISC-V that needs India,” said Naveed Sherwani, the world-renowned chip expert, at the event. 

The reason for this, he adds, is that the RISC-V ecosystem needs India for its growth, mainly for: innovation, population, and the thousands of universities that the country has. To tap into this potential, Sherwani also announced that RapidSilicon will be launching a chip tapeout programme in India for high-school and engineering students to work on real-world problems using open architectures. 

Similarly, Shapeti also added that as the RISC-V ecosystem continues cementing its reputation as a commercially viable alternative to other architectures – which may be 1-2 years away – there will be an explosion in training the next generation of semiconductor talent, all of whom will speak the RISC-V language. 

“Furthermore, the attention paid to standardisation of practices within RISC-V will lead to any talent from India familiar with the RISC-V design and development processes to be globally relevant due to uniform language of both hardware and software enabled by RISC-V,” he added.  

Samsung Foundry’s Dnyaneshwar Kshatri also acknowledged that timing-wise it makes perfect sense for both RISC-V and the Indian chip design startup ecosystem. 

“RISC-V’s need for lighthouse adopters to accelerate growth exponentially will be perfectly met by the outburst of new promising Indian startups that want cheaper, better alternatives to existing architectures to meet their unique design needs as an outcome of the new government policies,” he said. 

Bottlenecks to RISC-V

However, despite the rising popularity of this open-source architecture, Shapeti highlights a few bottlenecks to using RISC-V. Firstly, for Linux-based systems, there is a lack of unified virtual machine (VM) support. Additionally, the performance still has some way to go, although it is expected to improve in another 1-2 years. 

Another issue is the lack of open-source tooling and standardised design verification flows, which poses a challenge for developers. Lastly, although the RISC-V ecosystem is growing with a sizeable community, more grassroots work is needed for widespread adoption.