Chip design in Brazil

In 1971 the University of São Paulo produced the first chip in Latin America^[9]. A semiconductor is a material such as silicon whose ability to carry electric current can be controlled, and every chip is made from one. In 1991 the Informatics Law (Law 8.248) granted tax reductions to electronics companies that invest part of their revenue in research within Brazil^[3], and in 2007 Law 11.484 established PADIS, a support program for the semiconductor industry^[12]. In 2008 the federal government founded CEITEC, a state company in Porto Alegre that became the only chip factory in Latin America^[17], using a manufacturing process licensed from the German company X-FAB in December 2007^[15]. Its best-known product, the Chip do Boi, is a radio tag that identifies cattle, and it was the first chip designed in Brazil to reach mass production^[16].

A microcontroller is a small computer on a single chip, containing a processor, memory and connections to sensors and other devices, and it appears inside appliances, vehicles and industrial machines. BlueMacaw, developed under the project name u32BR, is a 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller, which means its registers and arithmetic operate on numbers 32 binary digits wide, with built-in Bluetooth Low Energy, a wireless standard for devices that run on little power^[1]. Five federal universities designed it together with electronics companies: UFSM, UFMG, UnB, UFCG and UFPR. Professor João Baptista Martins of UFSM and the Santa Maria Design House coordinated the work, which involved more than 50 people over 30 months and received funding through Softex with the support of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI)^[3,4]. The team presented it at the RISC-V Brasil event in Campinas on June 14, 2024^[3], and its official site opened in October 2025^[5].

TSMC manufactured BlueMacaw in Taiwan with its 22 nanometer process^[4,5]. A process is the set of manufacturing steps a chip factory uses, and its size in nanometers, millionths of a millimeter, indicates how small the transistors can be, which determines how many fit on the chip and how much power they consume. The processor runs at 200 MHz, meaning 200 million clock cycles per second, and has a 4-stage pipeline, a design that keeps four instructions in progress at once, each at a different stage of being fetched and executed. It has 32 KB of memory for instructions and 32 KB for data, where a KB is 1024 bytes and a byte is a group of 8 bits. Clock gating, which stops the clock signal in parts of the chip that are idle, and a retention mode that preserves memory contents while the rest of the chip sleeps, reduce the power it uses^[1].

RISC-V is organized as a base instruction set plus optional extensions, groups of extra instructions that a chip designer can include or omit. BlueMacaw implements RV32IC^[1]. The letter I stands for the base set of integer instructions, such as add, slli and beq, and the letter C stands for the compressed extension, which adds 16-bit versions of common instructions so programs occupy less memory. BlueMacaw omits the M extension, which provides mul and div. The simulator on this site implements RV32IM and accepts mul, but a program compiled for BlueMacaw has no multiply instruction available, so the compiler replaces every multiplication with a call to a short routine that reaches the same result using shifts and additions from the base set.

 # Multiply 6 by 7 using only base RV32I instructions.
li   a0, 6 # the number being multiplied, doubled on every pass
li   a1, 7 # the multiplier, read from its lowest bit
li   a2, 0 # the running total
loop:
  beqz a1, done # stop when the multiplier reaches 0
  andi t0, a1, 1 # isolate the lowest bit
  beqz t0, skip # skip the addition when that bit is 0
  add  a2, a2, a0 # add the current doubled value
skip:
  slli a0, a0, 1 # double the number being multiplied
  srli a1, a1, 1 # shift the multiplier right to expose its next bit
  j    loop
done:
  mv   a0, a2 # move the result into a0 for printing
  li   a7, 1 # service 1 = print integer
  ecall
  li   a7, 10 # service 10 = exit
  ecall

The program multiplies two numbers the same way long multiplication works on paper, but it uses binary digits in place of decimal ones. The multiplier 7 is 111 in binary. The loop uses andi to read the lowest bit of the multiplier, and when that bit is 1, it adds the current value of the other number to the running total. slli then doubles the other number, and srli shifts the multiplier right so the next pass reads the next bit. The loop ends when the multiplier reaches 0, and the program prints 42. On a chip without the M extension, every bit of the multiplier costs several instructions, which keeps the processor smaller and reduces its power use.

The Compilers Laboratory at UFMG, coordinated by Professor Fernando Pereira, wrote BlueMacaw's software development kit (SDK), the package of tools and code a programmer installs to write programs for the chip^[3]. Its compiler is GCC, a widely used free compiler that translates C and C++ into machine code, configured for RISC-V. The kit also contains an assembler, which translates assembly into machine code, a linker, which joins the translated pieces into one program, and the GDB debugger, which connects to the chip through a tool called OpenOCD. Programs run bare-metal, directly on the hardware with no operating system underneath, and the kit supplies the startup code that prepares the chip, memory allocation, and drivers for the peripherals, the built-in circuits for timers, serial communication, analog input and Bluetooth^[2].

At the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Anderson I. Silva, Altamiro Susin, Fernanda L. Kastensmidt, Antonio Carlos S. Beck and José Rodrigo Azambuja designed NoX, a 32-bit RISC-V core, the part of a chip that executes instructions, and released its design as open source so anyone can read, use and modify it. NoX has a 4-stage pipeline and is meant for chips that combine several small cores in devices at the edge of a network, such as sensors that process data where they collect it. It was presented at SBCCI 2024, the Brazilian symposium on integrated circuit and system design^[6].

On March 15, 2024, Instituto Eldorado in Campinas and researchers from Unicamp signed an agreement with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center to build a matrix multiplication accelerator inside a RISC-V processor, under the PPI-Softex program with MCTI support^[7]. An accelerator is a circuit dedicated to one kind of calculation, and matrix multiplication is the calculation that artificial intelligence models perform most. In August 2025 the government described a national supercomputer for the National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (LNCC), part of the Brazilian Artificial Intelligence Plan (PBIA), with about 5,000 graphics processors at first and a RISC-V accelerator and processor from Unicamp, the Barcelona center and Eldorado in a later phase^[8].

RISC-V International is the organization that maintains the RISC-V specifications, the documents that define every instruction. In February 2024 Brazil joined as a Premier Member, the organization's highest membership level, with the seat held by MCTI^[9]. Alessandro Campos, MCTI's general coordinator of semiconductor technologies, sits on the Board of Directors^[11], and Professor Guido Araujo of Unicamp represents MCTI on the Technical Steering Committee, the group that votes on new extensions and changes to the specifications^[10].

Brasil Semicon, created by Law 14.968 on September 11, 2024, extends the Informatics Law and PADIS tax incentives to 2029 and makes chip design, research, display and solar panel production, and the training of specialists eligible alongside chip manufacturing^[12].

The national microelectronics program trains chip designers through CI Inovador, a residency coordinated by Softex in which participants receive a monthly scholarship of R$5,000 while they study and work on circuit design^[14,22]. In June 2026 the graduate program in electrical engineering at UFSM created a research line in microelectronics and integrated electronic systems, with master's and doctoral places in the group that leads BlueMacaw^[13].

Brazil designs chips at current sizes but has no factory able to manufacture them. CEITEC's process works at 0.6 micrometers, or 600 nanometers, about 27 times the 22 nanometers used for BlueMacaw, so Brazilian designs such as BlueMacaw are manufactured abroad^[5,15]. The Chip do Boi also reached mass production at X-FAB's factories in Germany and the United States, while CEITEC made prototypes and small volumes in Porto Alegre^[15,16].

The National Informatics Policy, Law 7.232 of 1984, reserved the domestic computer market for companies with Brazilian capital for eight years^[24]. When the reserve ended in 1992 and the market opened to imports, many of the protected companies could not compete with foreign manufacturers and closed or were bought, often by multinational companies^[24]. The semiconductor plants of Transit, Philco and SID had already closed in 1981, 1984 and 1997^[25].

Chip production in Brazil today concentrates on packaging, the final stage in which finished chips are cut from the silicon wafer, the thin disc on which many chips are made together, and sealed in protective cases. Five packaging groups operate in the country, mostly for the memory chips used in computers and phones^[25]. A 2015 study by the national development bank, BNDES, described Brazil as one of the few large economies without local chip fabrication and recorded a semiconductor trade deficit, the amount by which imports exceed exports, that grew from under US$500 million in 1992 to about US$5 billion a year in 2013 and 2014^[26].

SIX Semicondutores, later renamed Unitec, was the largest private attempt at a chip factory. It was located in Ribeirão das Neves, Minas Gerais, and was conceived in 2005 with Eike Batista among its founders. It received about R$1.2 billion from BNDES, the Minas Gerais development bank (BDMG) and private partners, and IBM held 18.8% of the company and supplied its technology^[27]. Public banks suspended credit in 2015, the falling value of the real raised the cost of imported equipment, and IBM left in 2019 after selling its own chip manufacturing business^[27]. The plant never produced a commercial chip. It entered judicial recovery, a court-supervised restructuring of its debts, owing about R$600 million^[27].

The CI-Brasil program, created in 2005, trained more than 1,000 chip designers across three centers before its funding ran out in 2019^[25]. The national microelectronics program of 2002 grew to 20 design companies, and 7 of them remained in 2023^[25]. In January 2021, President Jair Bolsonaro issued two vetoes that removed articles of Complementary Law 177. One article banned blocking money in the FNDCT, the national science fund, and the other carried unused 2020 funds into 2021, leaving R$4.2 billion of the fund blocked^[28].

CEITEC nearly shut down. Decree 10.578 of December 16, 2020 authorized its dissolution, on the recommendation of the council of the Investment Partnerships Program^[17]. The government gave three reasons: federal transfers of at least R$50 million a year to cover operating deficits, losses of R$23.9 million to R$49.6 million a year between 2015 and 2017, and no buyer^[17,23]. The Federal Court of Accounts (TCU) suspended the process on September 1, 2021, after finding insurmountable weaknesses in the justification, among them that it ignored the loss of public investment and accumulated knowledge^[18]. Decree 11.768 of November 6, 2023 reversed the dissolution^[19]. In December 2024 MCTI approved R$220 million from the national science fund (FNDCT) to convert the factory to silicon carbide power chips, which are used in solar inverters and electric vehicles^[20]. The 2025 federal budget gave CEITEC R$60 million, and its president, Augusto Gadelha, said the conversion needed several hundred million and would be delayed^[29]. In May 2026 MCTI brokered a partnership between CEITEC and Global Power Technology, a Chinese company, for that production^[21].

In October 2026 the Eldorado Institute in Campinas started a national project to design an artificial intelligence processor on the RISC-V architecture. The State University of Campinas (Unicamp) leads it with them, and the Renato Archer Information Technology Center has joined^[30]. The Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation committed 50 million reais for the first year through FNDCT, BNDES and FINEP, and about 75 million more is planned for later stages^[30]. The design is a matrix accelerator: several chips combined on one board that carry out the arithmetic AI models require. It targets specialized workloads such as image generation rather than the training of general language models^[30].

The project continues the line of work this article describes. BlueMacaw proved that a Brazilian consortium can take an open instruction set to working silicon, and the accelerator applies the same openness to high performance computing. The motive is economic: Brazil imports about 8 billion dollars in semiconductors every year, and a domestic accelerator keeps part of that spending inside the country. The work forms part of the Brazilian Artificial Intelligence Plan, the same program behind the national supercomputer^[33].

A chip needs more than the metals on the map above. Fabrication plants also run on gases. Helium cools wafers during processing, keeps chambers free of contaminating air and finds microscopic leaks, and neon carries the light of the lasers that etch patterns into silicon. In October 2026 the United States Department of Energy designated helium a critical material: semiconductor manufacturing cannot do without it, and the world supply is concentrated in few countries^[34]. The natural resources panel on this page lists the materials and gases that feed electronics production and marks what this country mines or produces in its own territory.

The marks show production, not deposits. Ukraine holds one of the largest lithium resources in Europe and has not started mining it, and Brazil produces no helium at all, so any national fabrication plan inherits that import. Neon is the starkest case: before 2022 Ukraine supplied about half of the world's semiconductor-grade neon, and the invasion destroyed that production^[35]. Metals and gases together decide how far a country can build a domestic chip industry, and no country holds all of them.

The map on this page visualizes public datasets. The main sources are listed below.