Silicon Sovereignty: How CDAC's VEGA Core, CDIL and Suchi Semicon Anchored India's Homegrown Chip Stack

Behind the multinational investment headlines, a quieter story ran through SEMICON India 2026: an indigenous processor architecture, developed by a government lab, is now showing up in commercial products, hackathon-winning prototypes and India's first fully domestic System-on-Module.

C-DAC's VEGA processor core,  an open, India-developed processor architecture built on the RISC-V instruction set  has quietly become the connective thread running through a surprising share of India's indigenous chip and systems announcements. At SEMICON India 2026, that thread was visible everywhere from a broadband networking chip to a digital stethoscope to a forest-monitoring sensor system.
From lab core to commercial silicon
The clearest example came from Aheesa Digital Innovations, which used the event to detail VIHAAN-I, a networking System-on-Chip designed to bring fibre broadband into Indian homes. Built on the indigenous C-DAC VEGA processor core, VIHAAN-I was taped out on Republic Day earlier in the year and achieved first-pass silicon success on Independence Day,  a symbolically timed but technically real milestone for a small Indian deep-tech company. IndieSemiC went a step further at the event itself, launching what was described as India's first indigenous System-on-Module, the ISC-VEGA-SOM, which integrates C-DAC's VEGA Thejas32 proc...