At the GSA Executive Forum in Munich last month, Naveed Sherwani, CEO of SiFive, talked about the “democratization of silicon” as a result of deployment of open architectures, and how all microcontroller units will be based on RISC-V in the next three years. That’s a bold statement, and in an industry which has (and probably needs) so much legacy architecture, it’s difficult to see that happening in a three-year timeframe. But then I thought — could the catalyst for mass adoption be driven by China and India? Could this then be the moment where we do see widespread innovation and commercialization of RISC-V based products? Is this why Arm supposedly started a PR campaign through a web page to show why RISC-V was not such a good idea? To be fair, a spokesperson for Arm did tell The Register that the intention with its web page on RISC-V was “to inform a lively industry debate.” They added, “Regretfully, the result was something different, a page that wasn’t in line with Arm’s collaborative culture, so we’ve taken it down. Indeed, many of our own people also told us they didn’t like it.” It’s possible that the reason is that architecture is seen as picking up momentum, and particularly with the strong interest from Asia. Already last November, Western Digital announced its transition of future core, processor and controller development to the RISC-V architecture gradually, and once the transition is complete, it expects to be shipping 2 billion cores annually on the new architecture. Naveed Sherwani Sherwani commented that there are some 300 companies already looking at or developing with RISC-V in China. Rupert Baines, CEO of UltraSoC, said to EE Times that there’s huge innovation going on in China and that the drive for the architecture and products will more likely come from China than India. He has a point — India has been talking about its development of a RISC-V processor, the Shakti processor, for some time, as Rick Merritt wrote two years ago.

India does indeed have a strong background in advanced electronics and computing, but somehow its talent was in the early days diverted to becoming part of the offshore development teams for many of international semiconductor and EDA companies. The country’s ecosystem and engineers already have over 30 years of experience in developing electronics systems and processors. Texas Instruments first established a design center in Bangalore in 1985, and engineers there have worked on several DSPs and application specific products, including its first DSP for automotive in 1995, and various DSP cores and mixed signal ASICs, including 3G wireless chip set designs back in 2000. Ganapathy Subramaniam One of the TI alumni is Ganapathy Subramaniam (Gani), an entrepreneur and investor who started Cosmic Circuits after leaving TI and sold it to Cadence in 2013. Now a partner with WRV Capital, he spoke with us earlier this year about the potential for the Indian electronics industry. “The Indian electronics systems design industry has become highly mature, with many product companies now emerging,” Subramaniam said. “There’s now such a large talent pool, and with entrepreneurial skills, that India could be on par with the UK and Israel.” He said that not just the TI alumni, but embedded designers from Mindtree, Infosys and Wipro, are all going to do their own startups, with some even on their second or third. This momentum in India suggests that there could be potential new chip startups developing with RISC-V. One of the companies presenting at the RISC-V Workshop in Chennai, India, this week is InCore Semiconductors, which is developing its own RISC-V processor, and whose founders developed the Shakti processor. In a blog this week, UltraSoC CTO Gajinder Panesar suggested that RISC-V will soon open the door to a wave of new chip companies in India. “The image within our industry of India as being simply a ‘job shop’ is a false one. RISC-V presents a fresh opportunity to foster the huge talent pool and to benefit from India’s strong entrepreneurial spirit, without the technical baggage and cost burdens that come with traditional architectures,” Panesar wrote. His CEO, Rupert Baines, told us that despite this, he sees China as really picking up the ball on RISC-V faster than India. A lot of the work in China is already in advanced stages of development, and with the backing of government initiatives, such as Made in China 2025 and its desire to be less reliant on foreign chips, there is likely to be rapid development of both innovation as well as commercialization and manufacturing. Asked about the global impetus behind RISC-V, Baines said he sees China and the US leading the innovation. “I’m rather astonished that there isn’t much in Europe though,” he said.

Ted Marena, director of marketing and business development for the programmable solutions unit of Microsemi, told us after attending the RISC-V Workshop in Barcelona, Spain, in May 2018, “This was the first time we held this workshop in Europe,” Marena said. “Awareness is clearly much higher in the USA, but it’s important for the European market, particularly since the embedded design focus tends to be significant in the industrial market.” Rupbert Baines Marena said that while the x86 guys have a strong hold on the desktop and server market, and Arm in the mobile space, RISC-V is ideal for embedded applications and where customization is required. “You can optimize for performance, or you can optimize for IoT,” Marena said. “The power of open source is unbelievable — the fact that the instruction set architecture is open and frozen gives ultimate flexibility and power to the designer.” In Munich, Sherwani of SiFive also said that if you’re going to do widespread innovation, the architecture needs to be open. “How are we going to bring AI to the masses? Why has IoT not taken off?” he asked. Sherwani said the reason is that it’s difficult to design chips for thousands of use cases that need to interface to the world in many different ways. “The mindset in the semiconductor industry is that we can’t tape out just thousands of chips, and that needs to change,” he said. We have of course heard this argument a lot already. But taking this into the context of India and China, the allure of RISC-V and the potential for the architecture to dominate in those design ecosystems, which are striving to be self-sufficient, becomes significant. The open-source aspect provides access, and the ability to try and innovate with ideas for solving large scale challenges in the region become a strong draw. The talent and experience and the new-found confidence of entrepreneurs who have had some experience already in India provides incentive. And the government drive and investment in China provides the catalyst. With all these combined, Asia could indeed provide the moment for RISC-V to become mainstream. — Nitin Dahad is a European correspondent for EE Times.