RISC-V International Marks Banner Year for RISC-V Adoption, Technical Momentum, and Community Engagement

RISC-V adoption continues to expand across key vertical markets including aerospace, AI/ML, automotive, data center, embedded, HPC, and security

Santa Clara, Calif. – Nov. 7, 2023 – At the RISC-V Summit North America, RISC-V International, the global open standards organization, is celebrating the impressive momentum across the RISC-V ecosystem in 2023. Today, RISC-V has more than 4,000 members representing 70 countries around the globe, with more than 75 technical working groups driving progression on RISC-V standards, software, tools, and more. This year alone, RISC-V has ratified 12 specifications, with many more on the way. Furthermore, RISC-V has seen impressive adoption across a wide variety of industry verticals, with some of the biggest companies in the world unveiling new hardware and software solutions for RISC-V.

“The biggest takeaway for the RISC-V community this year is that we’re going to see RISC-V everywhere. More and more industries and companies are turning to RISC-V to innovate faster and take advantage of the vibrant culture of collaboration,” said Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International. “Our biggest priorities looking ahead are to continue to drive technical progress and deepen community engagement, while offering even more value and resources to accelerate the RISC-V ecosystem.”

The technical RISC-V working groups have made significant headway in ratifying specifications to accelerate innovation. Some of the recent updates include the ratification of Vector Crypto ISA Package and the Input-Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU) specification. Profiles will help to drive widespread implementation among different toolchains and operating systems. Similarly, Platforms will help speed up software development.

The RISC-V software ecosystem is growing fast. RISC-V just launched RISC-V Labs, a new program to expand the RISC-V open source software ecosystem and accelerate the efforts of developers. RISC-V Labs will bring together member companies from across the ecosystem to give developers the resources they need to build and test their software, from porting of existing projects to development of new components that will power the next wave of computing innovation. To learn about this initiative and find out how to get involved, please visit here.

Across vertical markets such as aerospace, AI/ML, automotive, data center, embedded, HPC, and security, companies are building innovative RISC-V solutions. RISC-V is already in tens of billions of cores on the market, and the growth of RISC-V implementations will increase significantly in the coming years. Some of these solutions are featured in the RISC-V Exchange, a directory of RISC-V hardware and software solutions for different markets, which has grown over 40% since the beginning of 2023. Additionally, the RISC-V Developer Boards program is helping to make development boards more accessible to the global RISC-V community to further spur innovation. Members contributing and offering boards as part of this program include Allwinner, Antmicro, Alibaba Cloud, BeagleBoard.com, Microchip, RIOS, SiFive, and StarFive.

To help accelerate this industry momentum, RISC-V hosts special interest groups for Android, automotive, data center, HPC, academia, and security. There are a number of resources available for the RISC-V community to learn more about the progress of RISC-V in these segments. For example, the recent webinar “Delivering the Future of Automotive Innovation with RISC-V” highlighted how RISC-V is simplifying the development and deployment of automotive technologies. To read about how Google and other community members have matured support for RISC-V in Android, please visit here.

RISC-V has continued to focus on driving engagement, talent, and adoption of RISC-V across the globe. The RISC-V Learn Online programs, which are designed to increase engineering expertise and career opportunities on RISC-V, have expanded to include certification programs so hardware and software professionals can continue to build their skills on RISC-V. There were more than 26,600 registrants for these sessions since the program launched in 2021, and more than 8,400 registrants in 2023. Additionally, this year RISC-V launched RISC-V Technical Sessions to offer a deep dive into various RISC-V technologies.

RISC-V members have also actively participated in other community-building activities including a virtual RISC-V career fair, a bug hackathon, and the RISC-V Mentorship Program. In 2023, there were 27 individuals who served as RISC-V Ambassadors and RISC-V Advocates to help grow and engage the RISC-V community. Plus, the Academia and Training special interest group has been focused on providing resources for universities to transition to RISC-V.

The flagship RISC-V event this year is the RISC-V Summit North America, which is being held Nov. 6-8, 2023 in Santa Clara, Calif., bringing together the global RISC-V community to collaborate, network, and share technology breakthroughs and industry milestones. The event features a rich program of technical and industry keynotes and conference sessions, paired with an expo hall of members demonstrating their latest innovations and offerings. The expo area also includes the RISC-V Developer Zone to showcase the range of technologies available to hardware and software developers creating the next generation of computing applications. To register now, please visit here.

Other events held in 2023 were the RISC-V Summit Europe, RISC-V Day Tokyo, and RISC-V Taipei Day. Additionally, the RISC-V Summit China sold out with more than 2,000 people registered for onsite attendance and thousands more watching the livestream.

Below are some highlights of recent RISC-V announcements:

• Ashling announced RiscFree™ C/C++ SDK support for the newly launched Synopsys ARC-V RISC-V ISA based processors.
• BeagleBoard.org launched the new BeagleV-Fire single board computer, priced at $150.
• Codasip unveiled its 700 family of high-performance RISC-V cores, in addition to introducing a commercial implementation of the advanced security mechanism CHERI.
• Microchip recently highlighted its expanded portfolio of RISC-V solutions.
• Qamcom introduced QERV, a tiny RISC-V CPU that is also exceptionally fast.
• Qualcomm is collaborating with Google to bring a RISC-V based wearables solution for use with Wear OS by Google.
• SiFive debuted its Performance P870 and Intelligence X390 RISC-V products for generative AI and ML applications, in addition to announcing that Sophgo has licensed several SiFive RISC-V high performance processor cores.
• Synopsys unveiled its new RISC-V ISA-based ARC-V™ Processor IP and joined RISC-V as a Premier member.
• Ventana introduced Veyron V2, a high performance data center-class RISC-V processor and platform, and partnered with Imagination Technologies to deliver high performance RISC-V CPU and GPU solutions.

To check out more RISC-V news, please visit RISC-V International’s In the News section and the RISC-V Blog.

About RISC-V International

RISC-V International is the non-profit home of the open standard RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), related specifications, and stakeholder community. More than 4,000 RISC-V members across 70 countries contribute and collaborate to define RISC-V open specifications as well as convene and govern related technical, industry, domain, and special interest groups. RISC-V combines a modular technical approach with an open, royalty-free license model — meaning that anyone, anywhere can benefit from the IP contributed and produced by RISC-V. RISC-V enables the community to share technical investment, contribute to the strategic future, create more rapidly, enjoy unprecedented design freedom, and substantially reduce the cost of innovation. To learn more, visit www.riscv.org.