VIHAAN's processor core is not licensed from a foreign vendor. VEGA is a family of indigenous processors built by C-DAC under MeitY's Microprocessor Development Programme, the same national effort that produced SHAKTI at IIT Madras and AJIT at IIT Bombay. VEGA implements RISC-V, an open and royalty-free instruction set architecture - the specification that defines the commands a processor understands. Because it is open, an Indian designer can build a RISC-V processor without paying licence fees or seeking permission from the architecture's owner, which is the structural difference from proprietary architectures. C-DAC is also the nodal implementing agency for the DLI Scheme, so it supplies both the core and the design infrastructure behind chips like VIHAAN.

Broadband routers and optical network terminals sit at the doorway of every connected home, and India has so far imported almost all of the networking silicon inside them. A chip whose processor core, operating system and security features are designed domestically narrows a supply-chain dependency that is also a security exposure, since a networking chip sees all the traffic passing through a household connection. The milestone also tests a policy claim: the DLI Scheme was built on the argument that India could enter semiconductors through design rather than waiting for fabrication capacity, and a working first-pass chip from a scheme-supported startup is the first order of evidence for that. The chip is not yet a commercial product - production tape-out is targeted for 2027 - so what has been demonstrated is design capability, not manufacturing scale.