Open source movement sweeps the chip industry

Following the software revolution, the open source movement is changing the chip industry.

Source: Bloomberg

Large technology companies have begun to get involved in RISC-V, which replaces proprietary technology in key parts of the chip design process with free standards that anyone can use. Although it is still in its early stages, this may create a new batch of processors that can compete with Intel's products and compete for Arm's licensing business.

In December, about 2,000 people attended a seminar in Silicon Valley to learn about RISC-V, a new set of instructions for control and processing. In just a few years, RISC-V has evolved from a university teaching tool to an open source standard that is being explored by industry giants including Google, Samsung, Alibaba, Qualcomm and Nvidia.

"Most major companies are making huge efforts for RISC-V," said Krste Asanovic, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-founder of SiFive, a startup that sells chip designs based on RISC-V.

Open source takes advantage of the contributions of many companies, not just the proprietary patents of a few companies. By sharing new code, anyone can see its changes and make their own contributions based on it. After being adopted by giants such as Microsoft in the 1990s, this ever-expanding approach has become the basis for the internet, smartphones, and many software applications. Last year, IBM acquired open source pioneer Red Hat in the largest software deal in history, and even Microsoft joined in, acquiring GitHub, the largest open source code repository.

For the $400 billion chip industry, opening up only a small portion of patents is completely insufficient. However, if enough companies commit to an open source approach, this could create a shared knowledge base that could be difficult for Intel and Arm to keep up with.

Early developments focused on instruction sets, which control the basic functions of a processor. For several years, there were only two important instruction sets in the market. One was Intel's X86, which dominated computer processors. Buying chips from Intel or AMD was the only way to use this instruction set, and Intel was the only company that could change it. The

other instruction set is the basis for all major smartphone components. It is owned by Arm, a subsidiary of SoftBank Group, and can be used for a fee, so other companies can also use it to design their own chips. But again, only Arm can change its basic architecture.

That leaves the rest of the industry to rely on those two companies for innovation, which for decades wasn’t a problem because most processors were general-purpose components that could be made faster and more efficient every year through improved production. But those industry rules are breaking down, as the steady march of ever-smaller chips defies the laws of physics, while artificial intelligence and the flood of data from the internet and smartphones require new ways of processing information. RISC-V backers say the new instruction set will help create better chips to power driverless cars, speech recognition and other AI tasks.

Google is using RISC-V in its OpenTitan project, which is developing security chips for data center servers and storage devices. “There are many other computing tasks, such as machine learning, that could benefit from an open computing architecture,” said Urs Holzle, who for years has overseen the technical infrastructure for Google’s massive data centers.

Samsung has said it will use SiFive’s designs in its chips for mobile phone components. RISC-V appears in microcontrollers, a basic form of processor, that are part of more complex chips sold by Qualcomm and Nvidia. Western Digital, one of the largest makers of data storage equipment, plans to use the technology in some of its products and has made its designs open source. Alibaba has announced a RISC-V-based chip, and several universities have released open-source designs.

There are now 200 Chinese members of the RISC-V Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in 2015 to promote use of the instruction set. An Indian project has developed six processors using the technology.

The RISC-V specification is developed, approved, and maintained by the foundation's technical committee, which is made up of engineers and other contributors from multiple member companies. Proposed revisions are posted on GitHub. RISC-V designs can be free or licensed, and while there are no strict requirements to adhere to the official specification, members have an incentive to make their designs compatible. This gives chip customers multiple choices for the blueprints they need to design components that communicate correctly with software, according to the project's backers.