Startups Help RISC-V Reshape Computer Architecture

By Saumitra Jagdale, EETimes Europe (July 17, 2023)

RISC-V has emerged as a game-changing open-source ISA. EE Times Europe has asked Semidynamics, Axiomise and Agile Analog about the future of RISC-V in the computing landscape.

The RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) is one of the most notable contenders to emerge in the ever-evolving realm of computer architecture. Because of its modularity, RISC-V provides more flexibility and customization possibilities than the ARM and x86 ISAs, and it requires no license fees. The open-source ISA, which started in 2010 as part of the Parallel Computing Laboratory (Par Lab) at the University of California, Berkeley, is now being used in more than 10 billion CPU cores in the market and continues on an aggressive growth path. The main factors that have helped RISC-V attract the attention of researchers, developers and industry leaders are its simplicity, modularity and openness.

RISC-V is the fifth generation of the Reduced Instruction Set Computer ISA. At its core, RISC-V employs a load-store architecture, in which data is loaded from memory into registers, operated upon using arithmetic and logical instructions, and then stored back into memory. It features a fixed-length instruction format with a variety of base integer instructions, as well as optional instruction extensions for floating-point operations, vector processing, cryptography and other tasks. The ISA is organized into multiple privilege levels, allowing for the secure and efficient execution of software at different levels of the system.

The modularity of RISC-V makes the ISA highly customizable and adaptable to various computing requirements, enabling designers to choose and incorporate only the instructions required to implement their solution. Its open nature and flexible design have made it popular for research, development and innovation in the field of computer architecture.

RISC-V is set to follow the same path as Linux, whose development community has made contributions over the years that have expanded the open-source operating system’s functionality and market. Similarly, developers in the RISC-V ecosystem are working together to create ISA and non-ISA specifications that leverage the advantages offered by RISC-V. Many companies have started developing products based on RISC-V and are targeting use cases from analog intellectual property (IP) and formal verification to GPU vector cores.

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