What Can RISC-V Chips Do?

The industry has been quick to embrace RISC-V and shows no signs of slowing down. For obvious reasons, academia has embraced RISC-V as a free teaching tool. In the enterprise market, companies of all sizes, from small individuals, are using RISC-V ISA to design hardware for a wide range of applications, including artificial intelligence (AI), virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR, Collectively known as XR), automotive, cloud, High Performance Computing (HPC), Internet of Things (IoT), storage, edge devices, and network infrastructure.

RISC-V is already well on its way to gaining significant market share in the embedded space, in processors for ancillary functions beyond the device's main application processor. These are deeply embedded applications - the end user doesn't know the RISC-V is on the chip, but it is there to perform key functions such as powerordering, state machine control, and voltage adjustment and monitoring.

Every week, however, we see headlines hinting at RISC-V for high-performance applications. In June 2022, University students at the University of Bologna collaborated with CINECA, Italy's largest supercomputing center, to produce the first RISC-V supercomputer capable of demonstrating balanced power consumption and performance. In September 2022, NASA announced that its next generation of high-performance Aerospace Computing (HPSC) processors would be built on RISC-V.

 Advantages of RISC-V

RISC-V has been around for a while, and if you're here, it's because you've heard of it. But maybe you still need to be convinced it's the future? If you're still wondering about the potential and benefits, here are five benefits of RISC-V.

1. RISC-V is an open standard

Let's start easy. This is nothing new, but let's be clear about what open standards mean.

Open standards do not necessarily mean open source. The RISC-V architecture is often described as "open source", which is inaccurate. As we explained in this post about licensing RISC-V architecture, RISC-V is like C, Wi-Fi, or LTE, RISC-V International plays the role of ANSI, IEEE 802.11, and 3GPP respectively in defining and managing standards that people can freely choose to implement. But this is a written standard -- not an implementation or a microarchitecture. Like other open standards, RISC-V licenses can be open source or commercial.

Therefore, the RISC-V Instruction set Architecture (ISA) is open, meaning that it is free and anyone can download the documentation to use it as they please without asking anyone's permission. This is great because it allows smaller developers, companies, and groups such as academics to design and build hardware without having to pay expensive proprietary ISA licenses and royalties. RISC-V is available to all.

2. RISC-V is attractive to university researchers

You may already know that RISC-V began in 2010 as a university research project at the University of California, Berkeley. As we've just mentioned the interesting financial aspects it brings, it's not surprising to see more and more university researchers looking into it.

Now, researchers can do this in two ways. Thanks to the work of various academic institutions such as UC Berkeley, there are free and open source implementations of RISC-V ISA available. These can be used in university projects to do work that would not be possible without open standards.

Going a step further, universities could partner with RISC-V, which is developing university courses. A great way for today's students to become tomorrow's engineers! Codasip, for example, has a college course. By working with academia, we can accelerate the development of RISC-V IP and design automation. Having university researchers working on RISC-V is another key to its success in addressing future technological challenges.

3. RISC-V allows customization

This is where the real potential of RISC-V lies.

The RISC-V open standard allows people to customize. However, most commercial companies do not support this. They sell standard, fixed products. Of course, there's freedom if you design your own code -- but for most people, that's not possible. Some companies, like Codasip, offer the best of both worlds: custom and a rich RISC-V ecosystem. Because RISC-V is a layered and extensible ISA, these companies allow you to implement baseline instruction sets, optional extensions, and add custom extensions for a given application.

Let me make one thing clear here. Don't confuse customization with configuration. Being able to choose the size of the cache is great, but it's not custom. Customization means the ability to modify instruction set architectures and microarchitectures. This is very powerful because this is how you can design a specific application processor that fits your unique needs perfectly.

4. RISC-V gives you freedom and ownership

Now let's go a step further. By allowing customization, RISC-V allows you to stand alone. You can work with open standards that you need to modify. You can now do your own thing your own way, while still talking about the advantages of the standard RISC-V architecture and software interoperability. This is very powerful stuff and will be crucial in many industry areas.

Let's take cars for example. Having the ability to differentiate is the key to success in such a fast-moving industry. Players in the industry need best-in-class quality IP, as well as processor design automation technology, which has the potential to accelerate innovation through processor customization.

5. The RISC-V ecosystem is growing rapidly

The RISC-V standard is maintained by RISC-V International, which includes more than 3,100 RISC-V members from 70 countries.

There used to be new processors and new ISAs. But where RISC-V is different is in the ecosystem. As both Intel and Arm have shown, this is a key factor in the success of processor architectures. More ecosystem players means more software, more tools: it means more developers choosing the ISA, more commercial traction, which in turn attracts more ecosystem partners in an accelerating virtuous cycle. It is this spiral that has driven RISC-V's market success.

RISC-V is for everyone. That's what makes it great. With more participants, from tool and IP providers to adopters, only more choice can lead to greater innovation.

How do I use RISC-V chips in my products?

In theory, RISC-V ISA is open for anyone to download and use to design their own custom silicon chips. In fact, it's not that simple.

Consider that, on average, more than 75% of the time and cost of designing a new chip goes into functional verification - making sure the chip works as expected before the flow sheet (which is physically implemented in silicon) - and then verification.

As chip designers adopt smaller process nodes, the process becomes more expensive. Designing something on 3nm can require a design team of thousands of engineers to work tens of thousands of hours and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to complete functional verification steps.

Compared to the costs associated with simulating, designing, and validating RISC-V chips from scratch, it often makes economic sense to license off-the-shelf and pre-proven RISC-V kerns from a growing list of commercial IP vendors. Most vendors also offer customized services for specialized workloads.

Of course, if you are going to meet the economies of scale that allow you to design something truly unique using RISC-V ISA, you will need electronic design automation (EDA) tools that can simulate with RISC-V ISA, design and validate your designs.