Andes Records a Rapid Growth of Design Wins in 2018 For Its New Family of RISC-V Processor Cores

Andes Signed 21 RISC-V IP Core Licenses in 2018 Throughout the U.S. and Asia across a Wide Range of Applications

HSINCHU, TAIWAN – April 8, 2019 – Andes Technology Corporation, a leading supplier of small, low-power, high performance 32/64-bit embedded CPU cores, including a broad family of RISC-V cores, announced it achieved a record number of design wins for its new family of RISC-V processors during 2018. These include the 32-bit N25F/A25 and 64-bit NX25F/AX25. This represents a dramatic growth in the number of licenses signed soon after introduction of the RISC-V cores. Adoption of the RISC-V architecture is rapidly accelerating in China, spreading throughout the Asia Pacific region, and sweeping the U.S. Over a third of the 21 licensee agreements were signed in China and another third in Taiwan with the rest in the U.S., Korea and Japan. The wins are going into a wide range of application. Nearly half of the sockets are in artificial intelligence designs, where RISC-V plays an important role. Other applications adopting RISC-V include block chain, communications, fingerprint recognition, FPGA, IoT, security applications, and solid state storage devices.

The rapid growth of RISC-V proves that increasing numbers of developers are adopting RISC-V architecture for their applications. Key to Andes successful lead in the RISC-V market was its rapid adoption of the RISC-V architecture. “We are thrilled at the customer acceptance of our RISC-V product line,” declared Andes Technology President, Frankwell Jyh-Ming Lin. “We joined the RISC-V Foundation as founding member because we were convinced of the commercial viability of the RISC-V CPU. In addition, the RISC-V architecture contains many of the fundamental elements already in our existing CPU IP product family. As a result, once the RISC-V foundation published the instruction set architecture (ISA), Andes was able to quickly develop our line of 32/64-bit RISC-V IP cores.” Owning to Andes’ rich experience in providing CPU IP, Andes achieved competitive advantage by meeting customers’ needs for RISC-V processor cores. “The advantage our IP has over competitive offerings is its ability to use special extensions already in existing Andes’ CPU IP to improve performance, plus other features such as PowerBrake, to reduce peak CPU power consumption; StackSafe™, to enhance system safety; and CoDense™ to reduce overall code size for a design.”

Andes RISC-V cores are based on AndesStar™ V5 architecture with single and double precision floating point support for high-precision data computations and MMU (Memory Management Unit) for Linux applications. In addition to the compactness, modularity and extensibility advantages of RISC-V ISA, Andes also provides customer-instruction extension capability to facilitate the design of Domain-Specific Architecture/Acceleration (DSA). “Andes’ RISC-V solution provides the capability to add custom extensions using our powerful Andes Custom Extension™ (ACE) tool,” stated Andes CTO and Executive Vice President, Dr. Charlie Hong-Men Su. “With ACE customers can add extensions specifically for their target applications to eliminate software bottlenecks and significantly improve runtime performance. While other CPU cores do not allow designers to add their own instructions to a CPU architecture, Andes provides COPILOT (Custom-OPtimized Instruction deveLOpment Tool) for ACE, which does the tedious but essential work needed to add a new instruction to a CPU ISA: creates the instruction’s RTL, its instruction set simulator, and its tool extensions—compiler, assembler, and debugger—automatically.”

As the recent popularity of RISC-V is rising among the CPU IP industry especially in China, the growth of RISC-V adoption and ecosystem is expected to rapidly accelerate.

About Andes Technology Corporation

Andes Technology Corporation is a public listed company with well-established technology and teams to develop innovative high-performance/low-power 32/64-bit processor cores and associated development environment to serve worldwide rapidly growing embedded system applications.

The company delivers the best super low power CPU cores, including the rising star RISC-V series with integrated development environment and associated software and hardware solutions for efficient SoC design. Up to the end of 2018, the cumulative amount of SoCs containing Andes’ CPU IP reaches 3.5 billion.

To meet the demanding requirements of today's electronic devices, Andes Technology delivers configurable software/hardware IP and scalable platforms to respond to customers' needs for quality products and faster time-to-market. Andes Technology's comprehensive CPU includes entry-level, mid-range, high-end, extensible and security families to address the full range of embedded electronics products, especially for connected, smart and green applications. From 2017, Andes expands its product line and provides a total solution of RISC-V, the RISC-V series as V5 families processors cores include N25F/NX25F, A25/AX25 and D25F.

For more information about Andes Technology, please visit http://www.andestech.com/