Inside Cyient Semiconductors Bet on RISC-V for Custom Silicon - EE Times

Abstract

Cyient Semiconductors is making a significant strategic commitment by centering its custom silicon design services around the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture. This focus aims to capitalize on the burgeoning market demand for highly tailored, domain-specific chips and the extensibility RISC-V offers. Cyient seeks to provide comprehensive design expertise, positioning itself as a critical enabler for companies needing optimized, cost-effective custom silicon solutions.

Report

Key Highlights

• Strategic Commitment: Cyient Semiconductors is explicitly betting on RISC-V as the future architecture for custom silicon and ASIC development.
• Design Services Focus: The company is positioning itself as a core provider of specification-to-silicon design services utilizing the RISC-V ecosystem.
• Addressing Customization Demand: Cyient's strategy directly targets the increasing need for domain-specific accelerators and highly optimized processors, which are difficult and expensive to achieve with proprietary architectures.
• Cost Efficiency: The shift leverages the licensing-free nature of RISC-V to lower non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs for clients seeking custom solutions.

Technical Details

• RISC-V Extensibility: The foundation of Cyient's approach is utilizing the modularity and ability to add custom instruction set extensions inherent to the RISC-V ISA.
• Comprehensive Flow: Services cover the entire semiconductor lifecycle, including architectural definition, RTL design, verification, physical implementation, and production enablement.
• Application Focus: Designs are centered on delivering high performance and power efficiency for specific verticals, such as AI/ML, industrial IoT, and specialized compute tasks.
• Toolchain Integration: Successful deployment requires strong integration with the open-source and commercial EDA toolchains that support RISC-V development.

Implications

• Ecosystem Maturation: Cyient's adoption signals increasing confidence among established design service houses, further validating RISC-V as a commercial-ready architecture beyond research or early-stage startups.
• Acceleration of Custom Chip Development: By reducing the architectural barrier and licensing overhead, Cyient makes high-quality custom silicon development more accessible to a broader range of companies.
• Competitive Pressure: This move places competitive pressure on vendors offering proprietary IP, forcing them to justify their higher licensing fees against the flexibility and community support of RISC-V.
• Innovation Driver: The ability to easily design specialized extensions allows for rapid innovation in application-specific processing units (ASIPs) and accelerators.