Technical Working Groups

The technical groups are the heart of RISC-V. These groups create and maintain the hardware ISA and other items around it, including test and debug frameworks, software specs, and other technical aspects.

The Technical Steering Committee (TSC) is the technical governance body within RISC-V, made up of task group chairs and Premier members, with a hard limit of one representative per company, reporting monthly to the Board of Directors. RISC-V organizes our technical work through standing committees which guide the work done by task groups and technical special interest groups (SIGs).

There are two important notes about the technical lists. One is that RISC-V does all technical work visibly in the open, in “read-only” fashion – active participation in working groups is limited to members, but the archives are publicly visible. The other is that contributions on these working groups are considered to be RISC-V community property. In other words, ownership of all specifications is assigned directly to RISC-V International, who maintains the copyright and Creative Commons license on behalf of the member community, and no individual contributor retains ownership of work that ends up in the RISC-V specifications.

Technical task groups that have achieved their final deliverables are considered “graduated” – they are kept as archives, but participation is locked. In addition, technical groups prior to 2020 are archived within the server in separate groups titled groupname-archive.

Members have access to all archives, and they may join any working technical group other than the tech-chairs, which is specific to technical working group chairs, and the TSC, which is specific to Technical Steering Committee members. Please also see the Guide to Working with RISC-V.

The following diagram lists all current technical groups. You can see these groups on the Member Portal. Non-members may view the message archives, while RISC-V members are able to actively participate and subscribe to individual mailing lists.