01-03-2019
By Sven Beyer, Semiconductor Engineering
RISC-V is hot and stands at the beginning of what may be a major shift in the industry. Even a cursory review of upcoming conferences programs and recent technical articles makes that clear. While it is still early in the evolution of the processor architecture, there is certainly the potential that RISC-V will be a game-changer in the IP and semiconductor industry. As “a free and open ISA enabling a new era of processor innovation through open standard collaboration,” it directly challenges several well-established processor families. This definition comes from the RISC-V Foundation, which assumed support and evolution of RISC-V after the original development in the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley.