Nov. 20, 2025 –
By Saumitra Jagdale, embedded.com
The industry has pinned a lot of optimism to RISC-V, considering the Instruction Set Architecture’s flexibility and open-source nature. While initially planned to be a tool exclusive to academic circles for learning and teaching, RISC-V is now much more than that. As the technology marks its 15th anniversary this year, its widespread adoption calls for a perusal of where RISC-V stands.
RISC-V’s strongest suits have been its modularity and its openness. And that’s how it won over Embedded System applications– the ISA brought forth the liberty to extend the base instruction set based on the specific application. Embedded applications are meticulous with power, memory, and silicon area– to avoid unnecessary overhead. RISC-V enabled engineers exclude (and add custom) instruction extensions and keep only the necessary ones to optimize for performance, energy consumption, or size based on the needs of the particular embedded application. Using RISC-V also meant cutting down on those licensing costs. The ISA eventually bulldozed its way into full-blown processor implementations.