Taking a RISC: Expanding Chip Options
By Michael Gurau, Altman Solon
EETimes (February 25, 2022)
After almost two years, the pandemic is still affecting many industries. The initial “stay home” impact of Covid hit air travel, hotels, entertainment, retail and other labor-intensive sectors such as manufacturing. Semiconductor manufacturing has been especially hard hit, leading to a well-publicized shortage of semiconductor chips, particularly in the automotive industry. A study from 2021 pegged the automotive industry’s lost revenue from the chip shortage at $210 billion.
To address the shortage and plan for growth, more than $150 billion in U.S. private and prospective public capital has been directed, committed and/or planned for semiconductor expansion. With high-value M&A transactions and offers, adoption of reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architectures from large and small companies, and a drive by the most affected parties to mitigate geopolitical and supply chain risks, the semiconductor industry has never been more dynamic.
While macro-level trends such as digitization and mobility account for much of the industry’s dynamism, also boosting its growth potential are the current and growing presence and influence of RISC, a simplified design that – for a range of applications – offers better price-performance. Licensed instruction sets – such as those from Arm or open-source RISC-V – enable anyone in the value chain with resources and access to contract manufacturing to compete with large, incumbent players like Intel and Nvidia.
In Nvidia’s case, it’s pursuit of Arm has now been abandoned.
E-mail This Article | Printer-Friendly Page |
Related News
- Arteris Adds Support for Tensilica’s Dataplane Processor Core Interface, Expanding Multi-core SOC Network-on-Chip Options
- Cadence to Acquire BETA CAE, Expanding into Structural Analysis
- proteanTecs Joins TSMC 3DFabric™ Alliance, Expanding Its Support of the 3D IC Ecosystem
- Analog Bits to Join Intel Foundry Services Chip Design Ecosystem Expanding 3nm IP Offerings
- Cadence and Imperas Support NSITEXE in the Development of Advanced RISC V Vector Processor IP for Automotive AI Applications
Breaking News
- China's Intel, AMD Ban Helps Local Rivals, Analysts Say
- PUFsecurity Unveils Next-Gen Crypto Coprocessor PUFcc7 Featuring High-speed Performance and TLS 1.3 Support
- SEMIFIVE Starts Mass Production of its 14nm AI Inference SoC Platform based Product
- VeriSilicon's complete Bluetooth Low Energy IP solution is fully compliant with LE Audio specification
- TASKING and Andes Announce FuSa Compliant Compiler Support for Andes RISC-V ASIL Compliant Automotive IP
Most Popular
- Intel and Arm Team Up to Power Startups
- Chiplet Interconnect Pioneer Eliyan Closes $60 Million Series B Funding Round, Co-led by Samsung Catalyst Fund and Tiger Global Management to Address Most Pressing Challenge in Development of Generative AI Chips
- PUFsecurity Unveils Next-Gen Crypto Coprocessor PUFcc7 Featuring High-speed Performance and TLS 1.3 Support
- Renesas Introduces Industry's First General-Purpose 32-bit RISC-V MCUs with Internally Developed CPU Core
- SmartSoC Solutions Joins TSMC Design Center Alliance to Boost Semiconductor Innovation in India