Summary

RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles. Unlike other ISA designs like X86 and ARM, RISC-V is provided under open source licenses that do not require fees to use. The RISC-V foundation, which drives standards and adoption started in 2015 with 29 members and now has 235 members.

Viability (5) Commercial viability

Little to no science or engineering risk in 2022, numerous products from all major providers in market.

Drivers (3)

The core driver of RISC-V is the duopoly of ARM and Intel and the royalties they charge (ARM Cortex-M0 DesignStart for IoT devices costs $370k upfront in royalties. Customers prefer to pay less for ISAs and reduce hardware costs. A second driver is the unease by the Chinese, Indians and Russians at having a fundamental piece of the semiconductor controlled by two Western companies.

Novelty (2)

RISC-V isn’t categorically better across any particular performance dimension, but it is cheaper and open-source. It’s not 100x more performant or energy-efficient. It’s existence likely limits rent-seeking by Intel and ARM and it healthy for the semiconductor industry. Being open-source there are also some experimentation and security benefits that are hard to quantify.

Diffusion (4)

Little in the way of adoption beyond a highly consolidated market structure around ARM and Intel. And this market structure is the result of over 50 competitors over the years; this duopoly is the result of strong competition. RISC-V designs do not need new production processes nor supplier and buyer behaviour change. Challenge of adoption is will be vendors assessing the cost savings versus difficulty of supplier change, technical knowledge and support, and new software and tools to learn. The cost of licensing an ISA from ARM might be a few million dollars but that is a fraction of the overall cost of bringing a new chip to market.

Impact (2) High certainty

Business model innovation leading to value chain change with profit redistribution from IP cores to EDA tools, fabless chip companies, and IDMs. RISC-V is forecast to be a $1B market by 2025, because open-source value is captured mainly as a public good. This will result in greater semiconductor innovation and a lower barrier to entry which is net positive for price and market growth. Open source software was underestimated for a long time, and the market is still undervaluing the impact of RISC-V and open-source generally. One of the biggest impacts is that RISC-V enables Russia, China and other countries to remove ARM and Intel from their tech stack in an effort to achieve tech sovereignty.

Timing (2020-2025) High certainty

Major IC design houses in the world, such as MediaTek, Qualcomm, NXP and SiFive, have launched several RISC-V solutions already. Intel announced in 2022 that it would join the RISC-V Foundation, launch a $1 billion innovation fund, and open up it’s fab capacity for RISC-V designers. The market is already well developed already with some consolidation.