Innovation in the software industry has benefited tremendously from open-source software and open APIs. Open-source software amplifies the capabilities of small teams by avoiding the need to recreate common components, and open standards allow multiple contributors to quickly create large ecosystems of interoperating components.

The recent rapid progress of the free and open RISC-V ecosystem has given new hope that the same pace of innovation might come to the hardware industry. Hardware innovation is sorely needed as underlying technology scaling has slowed to a crawl right when new application areas such as machine learning are creating insatiable compute demands.

As when open-source software first emerged as a viable force in mainstream computer systems, some of our colleagues are clearly misinformed about the impact of a free and open ISA on the hardware industry. In response, we here provide some guidance on these issues:

RISC-V has the potential to cut processor licensing costs, but more importantly gives customers the freedom to choose. An open architecture enables competition between open-source implementations, home-grown implementations and commercial pre-verified implementations with professional support.

The RISC-V ecosystem is relatively young, but growing far more rapidly than any previous ISA. The RISC-V ecosystem would have taken far longer to advance to its current state without the high-quality open-source compilers, operating-systems and debug tools used by all architectures that were quickly ported and up-streamed by the open-source community. In addition to the broad range of open-source tools, there are an increasing number of professional development tools from established industry leaders being ported to RISC-V in response to customer demand.

RISC-V was designed to support specialization while avoiding fragmentation by mandating a frozen common ISA standard around which the software community coalesces, while leaving ample space for innovative custom extensions that do not interfere with standard instructions and the standard software stack.

Security is perhaps the greatest challenge in modern computer architecture and existing proprietary security architectures have clearly failed, as is evident from wave after wave of published attacks. RISC-V provides perhaps the best hope for developing effective security architectures.

The ISA is simple and amenable to formal verification. The free and open license allows implementations to be audited by external experts. The security research community has embraced RISC-V, and there are already several commercial secure RISC-V core implementations. Several governments are investing heavily in RISC-V because they can develop their own trusted secure cores without relying on foreign IP, but while still maintaining compatibility with the RISC-V software ecosystem.

The free and open license terms have enabled a rapid proliferation of open-source RISC-V cores and a rapidly growing commercial RISC-V soft-core industry. Multiple companies that are foundation members are supplying high-quality pre-verified cores and professional support. RISC-V already has far more commercial soft-core suppliers than any other ISA, all compatible with a single standard.

Freedom to innovate and collaborate is critical to our industry's future, and will enable hardware to become a vibrant partner following software's lead in creating trailblazing new products. We welcome all to join us in the open hardware revolution.

— Krste Asanovic is Chairman of the RISC-V Foundation and Co-Founder of SiFive.