The 3rd Digital India RISC-V (DIR-V) Symposium 2026, which opened at IIT Madras’s Research Park in Chennai on Saturday, August 1, and runs through August 2, offers a concentrated window into where India’s semiconductor startup ecosystem is headed, with investors and industry leaders among the attendees alongside policymakers and researchers.

Organised jointly by IIT Madras, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and RISC-V International, this year’s theme — ‘Empowering Bharat’s Semiconductor Future’ — is squarely aimed at indigenous processor technologies, secure computing systems, hardware innovation and the RISC-V ecosystem, areas the government has been actively trying to seed with domestic startups.

For founders and investors tracking deep-tech, the event’s format is notable: alongside keynotes and panel discussions, it includes startup showcases and the DIR-V Grand Challenge Hackathon, giving early-stage teams working on RISC-V hardware a direct platform in front of industry and government stakeholders.

IIT Madras Research Park itself has become a hub for deep-tech startups working on hardware, semiconductors and embedded systems, making it a natural venue for an event meant to connect academic research with commercial and investment interest.

The event’s popularity is itself a signal of sector momentum: in-person registration closed on July 26, 2026, after the venue reached full capacity, though the symposium is being live-streamed on YouTube for those who could not secure a seat.

RISC-V’s appeal to India’s chip design community rests on its open, licence-free architecture — a structural advantage that lowers the capital barrier for startups compared to building on proprietary instruction sets, a point likely to feature heavily in the symposium’s startup-focused sessions.

RISC-V is an open-standard instruction set architecture that has drawn growing interest from chipmakers worldwide because, unlike proprietary architectures, it can be used and modified without licensing fees.

India’s semiconductor push has gathered pace over the past two years, with the government backing fabrication units, chip design centres and research programmes aimed at reducing reliance on imported processors.

Photo by Tester051005, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0