RISC-V Markets, Security And Growth Prospects

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Experts at the Table: Why RISC-V has garnered so much attention, what still needs to be done, and where it will likely find its greatest success.

semiengineering.com, Nov. 18, 2019 – 

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss open instruction set hardware with Ben Levine, senior director of product management in Rambus' Security Division; Jerry Ardizzone, vice president of worldwide sales at Codasip; Megan Wachs, vice president of engineering at SiFive; and Rishiyur Nikhil, CTO of Bluespec. What follows are excerpts of that conversation.

SE: Do you think there's room for more than one or two major RISC-V suppliers?

Ardizzone: It is very healthy right now having a lot of competitors out there. There are quite a few. I see two or three pretty strong ones, and we like to think we are one of those. I don't think there's room for five or ten, but there's room for a couple.

Wachs: What we want to do is leverage RISC-V and enable people to do really exciting custom SoCs around RISC-V, and we are very interested in growing the ecosystem. So we really want lots of competitive cores out there so everyone knows RISC-V. But it's not just about supplying the core. It's about what you going to do with this core that makes it interesting to your customer.

Levine: Right now it is really a good thing for the RISC-V ecosystem to see a lot of companies out there. The competition is good. It's part of the natural life cycle of an ecosystem like this. Initially, there are lots of companies competing. They have their own innovations and they bring their own technology to bear. Down the road, inevitably there will be some consolidation and some companies will drop out, and we'll end up with a small handful or less of companies that are really solid in the market.

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