For decades, the silicon design industry has operated behind closed doors. Designing modern processing systems is an exclusive, capital-intensive venture reserved mainly for large corporations with billions of dollars, long-term development cycles, and sophisticated laboratories. Fortunately, ChipForge is dismantling this present structure, replacing it with an independent, reward-based system where the best chips win—literally.
ChipForge is the premier decentralized chip-design project. Built as the Bittensor Subnet SN84 and developed by the TATSU ecosystem—also a decentralized project driving the future of hardware innovation and AI—ChipForge runs chip design as a real-time global competition. Instead of a closed, lab-based engineering, this project operates a model where engineers from all over the globe submit designs and earn rewards based on the performance of their hardware.
Traditional silicon design is costly. According to various industry data and reports, advanced AI SoC (system-on-chip) costs between $80— $200 million. 5-nanometer and 2-nanometer chips exceed a whopping $540 million and $725 million, respectively, to build. ChipForge aims to replace this outrageously steep economic model with a result-based incentivized one where contributors compete openly but only the top performers earn rewards. There are no massive internal payrolls, R&D costs, or multi-year burn. Only verified excellence is rewarded on ChipForge.
How the ChipForge Global Talent Competition Works
ChipForge demystifies complex chip designs into modular contests by publishing open and verifiable challenges to miners or engineers who independently have to create hardware designs. It utilizes the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) framework and evaluates each submission using the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools across a series of measurable performance metrics. They are:
Power consumption: Energy efficiency for battery-powered and edge devices
Area: Physical chip size impacting overall manufacturing cost
Performance: Speed levels and computational throughput
Functional correctness: Verified, synthesizable RTL (Register Transfer Level) output ready for FPGA deployment
All scores are normalized into a single ranking system—the best design earns rewards and if a better design arrives, the reward automatically shifts to the new leader.
ChipForge is breaking existing geographic and institutional cordons by allowing anyone with technical skills, regardless of location, to effortlessly compete and earn alpha tokens. Since these talents have to go head-to-head, only the best performer is eligible for rewards. This structure, unlike the present one, will spur contributors to work faster, iterate aggressively, and also deliver record-breaking designs that are not only quicker but also more efficient.
Real Results, Not Theory
This economic model has already delivered an innovative product—a feat most industry stakeholders declared impossible without the backing of a centralized silicon design giant. At the moment, a complete industrial-grade RISC-V processor with cryptographic ability has been built through ChipForge’s decentralized and transparent global contributor competition. The design generates real FPGA deployable RTL output and has also been duly evaluated using EDA standards. This breakthrough challenges the prevalent narrative that chip design must be expensive, slow, capital-intensive, and centralized. ChipForge is rewriting the story, introducing a new model to the semiconductor industry.
ChipForge’s use of the open-standard RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) makes it one of the fastest-growing architectural movements in the industry. In fact, according to various news reports, NVIDIA has been using RISC-V-based controllers internally for years. Also, Google now sees and treats RISC-V as a first-class architecture for Android development. Intel recently committed $1 billion to speed up RISC-V adoption through its Foundry ecosystem.
ChipForge Roadmap: What's Coming Next
ChipForge is an ambitious project that aims to replace the structures of the current silicon design industry. It hopes to extend far beyond single processors. The next phase of development is a shift to hardware-software co-design where compilers, runtimes, and AI kernels will evolve through the global talent challenges as well.
The roadmap also includes specialized Edge AI accelerators, mainly Neural Processing Units (NPU) enhanced for ultra-low power, compact size, and low latency inference. ChipForge aims to move from validation to real silicon fabrication, leveraging multiple programs like Google’s OpenMPW shuttle to transition the design from FPGA to physical chips.
ChipForge is changing the narrative, replacing the old model with one where global talents compete continuously and are duly rewarded for real performance, not hype. By transforming chip design into an open, verifiable, measurable, and challenging endeavor, ChipForge is paving the way for future breakthroughs in the industry.
