RISC-V is coming to the internet of things

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staceyoniot.com, Mar. 28, 2022 – 

Fans of this newsletter know I'm a major chip nerd. I started my tech career as a semiconductor reporter, and for the last seven or eight years I've been closely watching RISC-V, an open source chip architecture. The RISC-V architecture, which was developed a decade ago at UC Berkeley, competes with both that of Arm and the x86 architecture from Intel.

Already companies such as Nvidia, Western Digital, Samsung, and Alibaba have been building silicon based on RISC-V for their own internal use. But in the wake of Nvidia's failed takeover of Arm, a lot of companies took a look at RISC-V and began developing their own strategies around this instruction set, making it a soon-to-be competitor to Arm and Intel. However, it's not quite ready to take the IoT world by storm just yet.

In mid-month, SiFive, a company that builds RISC-V cores and licenses them out to other businesses that don't want to tackle that much chip engineering, raised a fifth round of funding that valued it at $2.5 billion. Even more interesting were the companies that were involved in the funding, which included the venture capital divisions of both Intel and Qualcomm.

Intel, long a jealous defender of its x86 architecture as the best and only option for computing, has softened its stance as it has lost ground to Nvidia on the AI side and Arm in mobile and IoT. Now, as it seeks to regain relevance, Intel is embracing the manufacturing of others' chips and other architectures.

Meanwhile, Arm for the last few years has been adjusting its business model to account for the threat of RISC-V, including making it cheaper and easier for startups and research groups to license Arm cores. The potential for a lower-cost instruction set has led at least one chip startup to try RISC-V, but I don't know how prevalent that threat really is. And it may be that Arm's planned acquisition by Nvidia helped push companies to look at RISC-V as an alternative as they worried that Arm might get purchased by a potential competitor.

Chris Jones, vice president of products at SiFive, said the company has fielded a lot of inquiries from worried customers. He also said that RISC-V has a lot of potential room to grow in the IoT sector, especially because the current market is so fragmented with different architectures such as Tensilica, Arm, and others. "Customers are getting a little tired of complex [instruction sets]," he said. "It's frustrating to switch tools and development environments based on the bit they are programming."

The chip shortage is also driving some embedded clients to reduce complexity in the types of chips and instruction sets used, since having a few parts can make it easier to swap available chips in and out of a design.

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