Is RISC-V Worth the Risk? The Tools & Partners You Need to Know

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RISC-V is the hot, new thing on the Embedded Block, with nearly every industry talking about adopting, switching, or running pilot programs. But it's unclear whether this decade-old architecture is delivering on all this hype as of yet. RISC-V was conceived about 15 years ago and first released about 10 years ago. Don't think it's untested tech, however.

embeddedcomputing.com/, Aug. 16, 2023 – 

"It's matured quite a bit since then," Tim Morin, Technical Fellow, Microchip Technology, told us. "If they're offering RISC-V cores in the market, you know you're getting IP that's qualified and has staying power."

RISC-V ISA is most often positioned as an open source competitor to ISAs configured with ARM IP or architectures, especially in the consumer and IoT, military, telecommunications, AI and ML, and Edge computing industries, and recently it looks like it's moving into automotive and the data center and server spaces. Many of the microprocessors and microcontrollers based on Arm IP and those from the RISC-V community are built to handle many of the same kinds of tasks, so they have more in common than differences and the major contrast drawn between them is the costly licensing fees Arm charges that don't apply to the open ISA offered with RISC-V. With that said, Arm does not yet appear to be losing much market share to RISC-V implementations. I'm not saying that you can get RISC-V silicon for free, but a large burden is removed from the supplier.

One of the strengths of RISC-V that's giving it some of this staying power is flexibility. "The really interesting thing about RISC-V is that people can use it like a traditional microcontroller," said Shawn Prestridge, US FAE team leader, IAR Systems. "However, you can also customize the chip so those who are FPGA-minded can add extra instructions to the RISC-V core or put in another ASIC for their project."

With all that background in mind, let's take a look at some of the key tools that are important to development in the RISC-V ISA ecosystem.

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