For decades, the semiconductor industry has operated on a simple, restrictive premise: if you wanted to build a custom chip, you needed a billion-dollar budget and a license from a handful of foreign architects. The Instruction Set Architecture, or ISA, the fundamental language of a processor, was a locked door.

That door has been blown off its hinges by RISC-V.

For senior executives in India’s electronics and IoT space, this is not just a technical footnote. It is a fundamental shift in the balance of power. It represents the single greatest opportunity to move from being assemblers of foreign technology to creators of indigenous intellectual property.

At Cionlabs, we have been watching this revolution unfold in real time. The year 2026 is shaping up to be the moment the Indian RISC-V ecosystem moves from promise to production. The question for business leaders is no longer whether to pay attention, but how to position their organizations to benefit.

What Is RISC-V and Why Should a Business Leader Care?

RISC-V is an open-standard ISA, meaning it is free for anyone to use, modify, and build upon without paying royalties to a single company like Arm or Intel. It is often described as the Linux of the chip world, an analogy that captures both its technical significance and its disruptive potential.

For a business leader, the implications are threefold.

First, there is freedom from vendor lock-in. You are no longer chained to the roadmap of a foreign supplier. If you own the RISC-V intellectual property, you control your product’s destiny. Second, there is a radical cost reduction. By eliminating licensing fees and leveraging open-source cores, the barrier to creating custom silicon drops dramatically. Third, and perhaps most importantly, there is true customization. You can design a chip that is perfect for your specific application, be it a low-power sensor or an AI camera, rather than forcing your product to fit a generic, off-the-shelf chip.

The Indian Express: DIR-V and the Sovereign Silicon Drive

The Indian government and research institutions have placed a massive bet on RISC-V. The Digital India RISC-V program, known as DIR-V, is the cornerstone of this strategy, aiming to make India a global producer of open-source hardware.

The vision is clear. By leveraging RISC-V, Indian startups can develop efficient, domain-specific System-on-Chips for AI, IoT, and high-performance computing, fueling the “Make in India” and “Digital India” missions. The government is not just offering encouragement; it is providing tangible support through the Design Linked Incentive scheme. As of early 2026, 24 startups are supported under this scheme, several of which have completed tape-outs, validated products, and achieved market traction. The government now plans to target at least 50 fabless semiconductor companies in the next phase.

This is not just academic theory. The ecosystem is maturing rapidly. At recent industry conferences, C-DAC has showcased live demonstrations of its indigenous VEGA processors powering real IoT applications. The building blocks for “Made in India” chips are here.

The Tipping Point: VIHAAN-I and the Aheesa Breakthrough

Theory became reality in February 2026. Indian fabless startup Aheesa Digital Innovations announced the tape-out of VIHAAN-I, the country’s first RISC-V-based broadband access SoC fully designed and developed in India.

This is a landmark event for the Indian electronics ecosystem. The VIHAAN-I chip, built around C-DAC’s Vega processor core, targets the millions of optical fiber terminals, the white box in your home or office, that currently rely on imported silicon.

Aheesa’s founder explicitly cited national security as a core motivation. As he stated, network infrastructure is all about security. You need to know every component that goes into it. If the core is coming from India, you know the security is already in place. For executives, the Aheesa model is a blueprint. They plan to take their Indian-designed platform global, offering white-label solutions to OEMs and ODMs worldwide. It proves that Indian intellectual property can compete on the world stage.

The Commercial Reality: Mindgrove and the Pragmatic Path

Not every success story needs to target telecom infrastructure. For companies like Mindgrove Technologies, the path into RISC-V is shaped by a simple commercial reality: the embedded market is far broader than any single vendor can serve. As one co-founder noted, although there are a large number of players, the market opportunity is larger than anybody can fulfill on their own.

Mindgrove, incubated at IIT Madras and backed by Peak XV Partners, recently launched an indigenously designed commercial microcontroller chip called Secure-IoT. The company has also partnered with Bosch Global Software Technologies to jointly develop and deploy system-on-chip solutions for applications across automotive, consumer electronics, industrial automation, and IoT infrastructure.

What is particularly instructive is Mindgrove’s market philosophy. The company focuses on how customers interact with the chip, through development tools, reference hardware, and the support ecosystem around it. An integrated development environment is everything. The company builds its own modules and works with partners so customers can begin using the product with minimal overhead.

This ecosystem strategy ties directly to survival. Long-term viability comes from targeting niches that the larger players do not touch and serving sectors with long qualification cycles. Once an industrial customer qualifies a part, they tend not to switch for a decade or more.

The State Track: C-DAC’s Bid to Build a National Baseline

Running parallel to the startup activity is India’s state-backed effort, anchored in C-DAC’s Vega and Tejas processors. Unlike commercial vendors chasing narrow segments, C-DAC’s mandate is broader: build a family of open, licensable RISC-V processors that academia and industry can adopt without depending on foreign intellectual property.

The Vega series ranges from the microcontroller class to high-performance embedded class processors, with some already taped out as ASICs. Tejas 32, the first ASIC, now ships inside C-DAC’s Aries development boards. Arduino compatibility was intentional, allowing universities and smaller manufacturers to plug it easily into existing development workflows.

Despite a crowded field of global RISC-V vendors, C-DAC argues that the Vega designs hold their own. When you compare the CoreMark and Dhrystone benchmarks, the Vega processors perform at par with other intellectual property available in the market.

Adoption has followed a familiar trajectory: initial hesitation, slow awareness building, and gradual uptake as RISC-V gained legitimacy worldwide. That has changed as developers have become more familiar with the ISA and as C-DAC has expanded its outreach. Many in academia and industry are purchasing these processor intellectual property cores, and some are buying the Tejas 32 SoC for integration into their product designs.

Building the Ecosystem: From Verification to Volume

A chip is only as good as the tools used to build it. Fortunately, India’s deep-tech startup ecosystem is rising to meet the challenge. Chennai-based Vyoma Systems, incubated at IIT Madras, is solving one of the biggest headaches in chip design: pre-silicon verification. Their platform uses AI-assisted, Python-based workflows to ensure that RISC-V chips are secure and functional before they are fabricated. This drastically reduces time-to-market and risk for design houses.

Furthermore, strategic partnerships are bringing high-performance RISC-V intellectual property to India under models that empower local ownership and development. This is complemented by collaborations in advanced packaging and testing, building a complete design-to-manufacturing bridge within India.

The government has also enabled infrastructure support, with SCL Mohali enabling 180-nanometer tape-outs and the upcoming Dholera fab supporting nodes up to 28 nanometers. Looking ahead, India aims to design and manufacture chips for nearly 70 to 75 percent of domestic applications by 2029.

The Analyst View: A New Landscape for IoT Chips

Industry analysts confirm that 2026 is a turning point. According to market analysis, the global RISC-V market is forecast to climb to nearly $3 billion by 2028, growing at almost 30 percent every year. Most of this momentum is coming from the embedded and IoT side, where engineers want more control over the microarchitecture and fewer licensing hurdles. Asia-Pacific is leading that shift, with countries like India using RISC-V to build custom silicon without paying for proprietary cores.

Furthermore, the market is demanding security-by-design with hardware roots of trust, a feature native to modern RISC-V implementations, as a baseline expectation. In a world of geopolitical supply chain concerns, localizing design and production is no longer just a nice-to-have; it is a strategic imperative for supply resilience.

What This Means for Your Next Product

For companies looking to launch white-label smart devices, robotics, or AIoT solutions, the RISC-V revolution offers a new path forward.

Imagine building a product where the core processor is not only customized for your exact power and performance needs but is also inherently sovereign, secure, and free from global supply chain whims. That is the promise of the RISC-V revolution.

The emergence of powerful, secure, and Indian cores like VEGA and SHAKTI presents an exciting opportunity. The key adoption drivers for indigenous semiconductor chips in India have been identified as design capability, manufacturing readiness, go-to-market strategy, and policy support. While India demonstrates strong design competence and policy intent, the gaps in manufacturing scale and supply-chain robustness are closing rapidly.

At Cionlabs, our expertise lies in bridging the gap between silicon capability and market-ready products. While we continue to leverage proven chipsets for a wide range of applications, we are actively engaged with the RISC-V ecosystem. We are ready to help clients evaluate whether an indigenous RISC-V solution makes sense for their specific use case, balancing factors like volume, time-to-market, and performance requirements.

Conclusion: From Consumers to Creators

India’s semiconductor story is being rewritten. We are moving from a nation of chip consumers to a nation of chip creators. The RISC-V architecture is the vehicle for this transformation, democratizing access to the most fundamental layer of technology.

The tape-out of VIHAAN-I is not an isolated event; it is the starting gun. The partnership between Mindgrove and Bosch is not a pilot; it is a validation of commercial viability. As the ecosystem of cores, tools, and manufacturing matures, the companies that embrace this shift early will be the ones defining the next generation of IoT hardware.

The conversation has shifted from whether Indian-designed chips can work to how quickly they can scale. The resistance to an Indian-built RISC-V chip has eased over time. Government endorsement helped, but the bigger shift came from positioning Indian chip designers not as vendors but as problem solvers. If customers are looking for a change because of cost or a feature that they are not able to get, then the resistance naturally drops.

At Cionlabs, we are ready to partner with you to navigate this new landscape. Whether you need a design based on proven, market-ready silicon or a forward-looking roadmap that leverages indigenous RISC-V intellectual property, we have the expertise to turn your vision into a secure, scalable, and sovereign product.

The future of Indian hardware is open. Let us build it together.

Dr. Sanjay Ahuja is Founder & CEO of Cionlabs, an electronics design house specializing in IoT and AI-enabled hardware for the Indian market. Cionlabs partners with leading chipset providers and actively tracks the emerging RISC-V ecosystem to deliver white-label products and custom designs for smart devices, robotics, AI cameras, and industrial IoT applications.