How is RISC-V’s open and customizable design changing embedded systems?

By Tejas Patel

August 13, 2025

The way embedded systems are designed is changing. Today, there is a growing need for devices that are not only more efficient but also built for specific tasks. Due to this changing environment, RISC-V is quickly becoming a strong alternative to traditional processor designs.

What sets RISC-V apart, especially in today’s embedded world, is its modular and scalable architecture. Unlike monolithic legacy solutions, RISC-V enables designers to tailor processors for precise performance, power, and area requirements – essential for applications like IoT, automotive electronics, and consumer devices. With its streamlined instruction set, RISC-V simplifies hardware implementation, resulting in lower silicon costs and increased integration of features such as larger registers and caches. This approach accelerates innovation, enabling companies to rapidly prototype and deploy processors optimized for a range of applications, from ultra-low-power wearables to high-performance edge computing.

According to the report from Global Market Insights, the RISC-V market is valued at USD 1.76 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach USD 25.73 billion by 2034, growing at a CAGR of 30.7%.

1. How does RISC-V's open instruction set contribute to innovation?

One of the most powerful aspects of RISC-V is its open instruction set architecture (ISA). Unlike traditional ISAs that come with licensing fees and vendor restrictions, RISC-V is completely free and open. This opens the door for engineers to:

• Experiment with new ideas without legal or financial hurdles.
• Tailor the instruction set to match specific application needs.
• Dive deep into the architecture for security audits or performance tuning.

In embedded systems, where constraints are tight and optimization is key, this level of freedom is a major advantage. It allows us to build solutions that are purpose-built rather than vendor-bound.

2. How does RISC-V support design flexibility and customization?

RISC-V’s modular structure is a huge win for embedded design. Starting with a minimal base, one can add only the extensions they need for their specific applications. This approach creates highly customized solutions without unnecessary overhead, making devices more efficient and better suited to their tasks.

Here are some commonly used extensions that enhance flexibility:

• Floating-Point Extension (F/D/Q): Adds support for single, double, or quad-precision floating-point operations, which is ideal for applications involving signal processing, control systems, or scientific computation.
• Atomic Extension (A): Enables atomic memory operations, which are essential for building multi-thread or real-time systems that require safe concurrency.
• Compressed Instruction Extension (C): Reduces code size by using 16-bit instructions, which is especially useful in memory-constrained environments like microcontrollers.
• Vector Extension (V): Provides SIMD-style parallelism for workloads like machine learning, image processing, and high-performance computing.
• Bit Manipulation Extension (B): It offers efficient bit-level operations, which are common in embedded protocols, cryptography, and low-level device control.

It even defines custom instructions for specialized tasks.

This flexibility is especially useful when building systems with specific requirements, like real-time control, low-power sensing, or edge AI.

Special advantage for FPGA-based designs

RISC-V brings unique advantages when implemented as a soft-core processor on FPGAs, making it an ideal choice for embedded systems used in real-world customer applications.

Key Benefits for Embedded Applications:

• Faster time-to-market through Rapid iteration and deployment is made possible by access to open-source RISC-V cores such as Rocket, VexRiscv, and PicoRV32, all optimized for FPGA synthesis.
• Cost efficiency by eliminating licensing fees and using open-source cores.
• Field upgradability, allowing post-deployment enhancements without hardware changes.
• Application-specific optimization for power, performance, and responsiveness

This combination of developer agility and customer-centric optimization makes RISC-V a compelling choice for FPGA-based embedded systems across industries.

3. How does RISC-V enable better optimization for power efficiency and performance?

Balancing power consumption and performance is a constant challenge in embedded systems. RISC-V helps address this by:

• Allowing lean implementations that reduce power draw, for example, using a minimal RISC-V core with only essential instructions/extensions in a battery-powered IoT sensor.
• Supporting custom instructions to accelerate critical workloads.

Because the architecture is open, we can simulate and iterate quickly, finding the right balance for each use case. Whether it is a battery-powered wearable or a high-throughput industrial controller, RISC-V gives us the tools to optimize effectively.

4. Is RISC-V ready for real-world deployment?

Absolutely—RISC-V has moved well beyond the prototyping phase and is now powering commercial-grade embedded products across industries like IoT, automotive, industrial automation, and consumer electronics.

The ecosystem has matured significantly:

• Toolchains like GCC and LLVM are stable and production-ready.
• RTOS support is strong, with Zephyr, FreeRTOS, and others offering full integration.
• Linux support is robust, with upstream kernel support for RISC-V continuing to improve. Many RISC-V SoCs now run full Linux distributions, making it viable for more complex embedded systems and edge computing.
• Hypervisor support is also progressing. Projects like KVM on RISC-V and Xvisor are actively being developed, and while not yet as mature as on ARM or x86, the foundation is there and improving rapidly.

Vendors like SiFive, Andes, and Alibaba are delivering silicon that meets commercial standards, and the open nature of the ISA gives companies more control over long-term product strategy. This results in businesses being able to confidently build and ship RISC-V-based products without compromising on reliability, scalability, or ecosystem support.

Final Thoughts

RISC-V is not just another architecture—it is a shift in how we think about embedded system design. It gives the ability to go beyond using a platform and shape it to fit the product’s needs. Whether it demands optimizing power, customizing for performance, or deploying at scale, RISC-V is proving itself as a practical and powerful choice.

MosChip® has already tapped into the flexibility and open-source nature of RISC-V to build next-generation embedded solutions. With deep expertise in hardware design, system engineering, and device engineering, the company supports custom SoC design, embedded software, and FPGA development for building smarter, more efficient, and scalable systems.

MosChip® helps integrate RISC-V processors into both FPGAs and ASICs, design custom ISA extensions for domain-specific acceleration, and optimize solutions for low-power edge applications. MosChip’s capabilities span secure boot implementation, real-time processing enablement, Linux, and RTOS support (Zephyr, FreeRTOS, etc.), BSP customization (Yocto, Buildroot, etc.), peripheral integration, and scalable memory and cache hierarchies. Whether it is powering an ultra-low-power wearable, a rugged industrial controller, or a high-performance AI-enabled edge module, MosChip® helps clients harness the modular architecture of RISC-V to meet their specific application needs.

Author

Tejas Patel is an embedded systems professional with over a decade of experience, specializing in firmware development, board bring-up, Yocto integration, and BSP creation. His technical expertise spans various ARM64 SoCs and includes customizing RISC-V cores on FPGA platforms and enabling software support for bare-metal applications, RTOS environments such as FreeRTOS and Zephyr, and Linux. Tejas has also contributed to the open-source community by upstreaming changes to the Linux kernel. With hands-on experience in USB device driver development and a strong foundation in both individual and leadership roles, he consistently delivers robust, high-performance embedded solutions with a focus on innovation and reliability.