RISC-V Now! — Where Specification Meets Scale!

In forty plus years as a semiconductor professional I have never seen a semiconductor design ecosystem build as fast and as strong as RISC-V. As a result, RISC-V Now! has emerged as a pivotal gathering, a conference with a clear and ambitious mission: To transform the open, modular, and flexible RISC-V ISA from an exciting specification into real products that ship at scale. Unlike many technical conferences that celebrate theoretical advances, academic breakthroughs, and road-map visions, RISC-V Now! is designed as a crucible where ideas are forged into hardware, software, and commercial ecosystems that meet real-world demand. It is here that “spec goes to scale.”

Last year’s event welcomed ~600 semiconductor professionals from 250+ companies and more than 50% engineering leaders. Companies represented included Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, TSMC, Synopsys, Cadence, Siemens EDA, Alibaba, Renesas.

A Forum for Real Products

The central theme of RISC-V Now! is productization. Attendees including engineers, architects, business leaders, and open-source advocates come together not just to talk about what RISC-V could enable, but what it is enabling now. From silicon implementations and SoC designs to compilers, operating systems, and security frameworks, the conference highlights concrete progress across the industry.

By emphasizing real products rather than prototypes or speculative technologies, RISC-V Now! reduces the gap between specification and shipment. Sessions are structured around case studies, deployment stories, and lessons learned from bringing RISC-V solutions to market. This pragmatic focus accelerates commercial maturity by helping participants avoid common pitfalls, leverage proven strategies, and adopt best practices that have already shown success.

Building an Ecosystem

A key challenge for any open standard is building a robust ecosystem — one that encompasses tools, IP blocks, software stacks, developer communities, and end-user markets. For RISC-V, ecosystem development is especially critical because the architecture thrives on extensibility; companies can add custom extensions to differentiate their products. Without shared tooling and interoperability norms, such flexibility could fragment the landscape. RISC-V Now! tackles this challenge head-on by bringing stakeholders together to align on standard extensions, testing frameworks, and compliance suites.

Workshops and working groups at the conference focus on unifying performance benchmarks, enhancing support in major toolchains like LLVM and GCC, and integrating RISC-V into mainstream operating systems such as Linux and real-time OSes for embedded systems. This collaborative environment accelerates ecosystem cohesion, which in turn boosts confidence among developers and buyers alike that RISC-V-based products will be reliable, sustainable, and future-proof.

Scaling for Global Impact

As more companies commit to RISC-V silicon, the need to scale goes beyond technical readiness — it requires scalable supply chains, global partnerships, and business models that can compete with incumbents. RISC-V Now! elevates discussions about commercialization strategies that work in diverse markets, from edge and IoT devices to high-performance computing.

Investor panels and industry keynotes explore how companies are securing funding, navigating IP landscapes, and building go-to-market channels that accelerate adoption. By spotlighting success stories from startups that have shipped RISC-V products, the conference demystifies the path to scale and signals to the broader tech ecosystem that RISC-V is more than an academic curiosity, it’s a commercially viable alternative powering real devices in production.

Fostering a Collaborative Culture

Perhaps the most enduring impact of RISC-V Now! is the culture it fosters. The open ethos of RISC-V where collaboration is not only encouraged but essential is reinforced throughout the conference. Engineers share code, companies discuss interoperability challenges transparently, and cross-organizational working groups form organically. This culture accelerates innovation in ways that closed, proprietary models struggle to match.

By providing a forum where spec authors, implementers, and product teams converge, RISC-V Now! ensures that technical visions are grounded in practical realities and that practical challenges inform future standard evolution. In essence, it creates a virtuous cycle where the architecture continuously improves while products based on it flourish.

Bottom Line: RISC-V Now! is more than a technical conference, it is a catalyst for transformation in computing architecture. By focusing on tangible products that scale, it bridges the gap between open specification and market success. It builds community, fosters ecosystem maturity, and empowers innovators to take RISC-V from concept to widespread deployment. In an industry hungry for openness, flexibility, and performance, RISC-V Now! is where the future of open hardware is being built one shipment at a time.

Silicon Valley, USA
DoubleTree By Hilton San Jose
2050 Gateway Place, San Jose, CA, 95110, US
Both Days Are Free To Attend.

I hope to see you there!

Also Read:

The Launch of RISC-V Now! A New Chapter in Open Computing

Pushing the Packed SIMD Extension Over the Line: An Update on the Progress of Key RISC-V Extension

RISC-V: Powering the Era of Intelligent General Computing