Semiconductor giants team up to lay out the "third" architecture: the era of RISC-V architecture is accelerating

2023-08-08

Recently, Qualcomm , NXP Semiconductors , Nordic Semiconductor ASA, Germany's Robert Bosch and Infineon Technologies AG jointly issued a statement stating that these semiconductor chip companies will jointly invest in the establishment of A new company to promote the open-source RISC-V architecture for chip design.

At present, the performance competition in the mobile chip market is intensifying. However, no matter Qualcomm, Nvidia, Samsung, or Apple, they are actually developed based on the Arm architecture and are members of the Arm Alliance. So far, Arm has occupied more than 95% of the market share in the field of smartphone chips, including tablets, etc. Arm has actually completely controlled the entire mobile chip field.

Global chipmakers have long worried about relying too heavily on technology from SoftBank Group Corp's Arm. The technology is ubiquitous in smartphones and rapidly expanding into large appliances, data centers and automotive uses. In order to avoid excessive reliance on the Arm architecture and enhance its voice over Arm, chip giants are devoting a large amount of research resources to focus on the RISC-V architecture.

At its core, RISC-V encourages innovation, allowing any company to develop cutting-edge custom hardware based on an open-source instruction set. Further adoption of RISC-V technology will promote diversity in the electronics industry, lower barriers to entry for small and emerging companies, and provide higher scalability for established companies.

Meanwhile, RISC-V is an open-source standard for chips that proponents hope will replace proprietary IP for part of the semiconductor design phase, theoretically making the technology cheaper and more accessible. The standard is still relatively new, but progress is being made. Chipmakers are looking for alternatives to Arm.

In fact, many giants have started the application of RISC-V architecture before. In January of this year, Google officially announced that Android will support the RISC-V instruction set architecture. The announcement comes from the RISC-V Summit held last December. Currently, users can download a version of Android with very limited support for RISC-V, but it does not support the Android Runtime (ART) for Java workloads. Most Android applications are distributed using Java code, which means that almost no applications will support RISC-V on Android at present.

The establishment of a joint venture company by major chip giants to develop and apply RISC-V will further accelerate the innovative application of this chip architecture. Of these, Qualcomm's involvement is notable, as the chip giant has been embroiled in a licensing legal dispute with Arm and has hinted that at some point it may be included in products including its popular Snapdragon smartphone chips. Prefer RISC-V over Arm architecture. Qualcomm is also involved in the automotive field, especially smart cockpit systems. Other large semiconductor chipmakers, including Intel, have also indicated that they will support the development of RISC-V chips in the future. That could give the movement even more momentum.

Ziad Asghar, senior vice president of product management at Qualcomm, said: "We are excited to join other industry players to promote the expansion of the RISC-V ecosystem through the development of next-generation hardware. Qualcomm Technologies has invested in RISC-V for more than 5 years, and we have Integrating RISC-V microcontrollers into many of our commercial platforms. We believe RISC-V's open-source instruction set will increase innovation and potentially transform the industry."

A spokesman for Infineon said the new RISC-V company may operate more like a consulting firm, and hinted at the possibility of some sort of new branding that other companies making chips based on the reference architecture would be able to use. The spokesman also said that Infineon plans to sell products using RISC-V and other kits using existing mature MCU cores.

In a statement, NXP executive vice president and chief technology officer Lars Reger said the joint venture will work to "be the first to pioneer fully certified RISC-V-based IP and architectures for the automotive industry." Reger added: "Creating a one-stop ecosystem where customers can choose turnkey assets will strengthen the adoption of RISC-V in many European industries."

Peter Schiefer, president of Infineon's automotive division, said that as automotive applications move toward software-defined, there is a general need for standardization and ecosystem compatibility across the industry.

Arm is considering different ways to boost revenue, such as raising license prices and the possibility of expanding licenses, following industry challenges and SoftBank Group facing financial difficulties. Qualcomm and other semiconductor suppliers are looking at alternative business models, including RISC-V and open-source designs to break Arm's monopoly.

2023 is considered the breakthrough year for RISC-V. At present, driven by the innovation and application of the world's largest semiconductor manufacturers, global hyperscale data centers and consumer equipment companies, RISC-V will no longer be just an embedded tool, and its application era is accelerating.

About Qualcomm:

Billions, maybe trillions of times a day we often do what many thought was impossible. That’s how often people around the world touch something made better by Qualcomm. It could be the smartphone in your pocket, the tablet on your coffee table, that wireless modem in your briefcase, it could even be that navigation system in your car or that action camera strapped to your chest.

Who is Qualcomm, and what do they do? They are engineers, scientists, and business strategists. They are from many different countries and speak many different languages. They come from diverse cultures and have unique perspectives. Together, they focus on a single goal—invent mobile technology breakthroughs. As the world’s industries evolve, so do the connections enabled through our wireless and computing solutions. By helping homes, cars, cities, education, wearables, and healthcare share more interactions and data across a variety of networks, we’re weaving the fabric of the Internet of Things so that entire industries can redefine what’s possible.

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About NXP Semiconductors:

NXP Semiconductors is a leading supplier of embedded controllers offering a broad portfolio of MCUs with Arm-based processors and microcontrollers for a variety of industries including automotive, wireless connectivity and more. They continue to drive innovation offering a strong Power Management portfolio for industrial and automotive applications, including multiple power supplies and battery management solutions. NXP products power and connect across the globe building solutions, helping enhance the proficiency of people, organizations and the world has a whole.

Freescale Semiconductor has been acquired by NXP Semiconductor. Freescale Semiconductor parts are now a part of the NXP family (Dec 2015).

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Semiconductor giants team up to lay out the "third" architecture: the era of RISC-V architecture is accelerating

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