Lin Zhiming of Jingxin: To promote the healthy development of RISC-V ecosystem, enterprises should participate in sharing

According to Jiwei.com, in 2010, the new instruction set RISC-V, which was created by the University of California, Berkeley, officially appeared in everyone's field of vision. The emergence of this new microprocessor instruction set architecture (ISA) not only set off a wave of enthusiasm in the processor architecture market, but was even considered to be able to break the long-term monopoly of processor chips by the X86 architecture and the Arm architecture.

Currently, the RISC-V Foundation has more than 150 members worldwide, including international giants such as Google, Samsung, Nvidia, Tesla, IBM, Qualcomm, NXP, and Western Digital (WD). Domestic promoters include VeriSilicon, Hangzhou C-SKY Microelectronics, Andes, Corelite, and Ingenic.

In the past two years, RISC-V has set off a wave of enthusiasm in China, and is seen as an opportunity for the development of "independent and controllable" domestic chips. In 2018, the China RISC-V Industry Alliance and the China Open Instruction Ecosystem (RISC-V) Alliance were established. According to data, more than 300 companies in China are paying attention to RISC-V or developing with the RISC-V instruction set.

Andes Technology General Manager Lin Zhiming (right) and Andes Technology Chief Technology Officer Su Hongmeng (left)

Recently, Lin Zhiming, general manager of Andes Technology, said in an interview with Jiwei.com that in 2018 alone, the number of SoC chips embedded with Andes processor cores exceeded 1 billion, and the cumulative number over the years reached 3.5 billion by the end of 2018. They are widely used in the fields of Internet of Things, voice recognition, deep learning, video games, touch screen controllers, GPS, wireless charging, storage, Bluetooth, WiFi, network equipment and sensors.

It is understood that Andes Technology is a founding member of the RISC-V Foundation, the convener or co-convener of several task groups, and one of the main maintainers of the RISC-V open source software GNU/LLVM tool chain and Linux core-related software. It also serves as the vice chairman of the China RISC-V Industry Alliance and is very active in promoting the RISC-V architecture and ecosystem.

In 2018, in addition to continuing to support the V3 architecture, Andes Technology launched the 32/64-bit embedded microprocessor A25/AX25 suitable for Linux-based application architecture in the RISC-V architecture series. Its applications include higher-end and high-priced products such as drones, smart wireless communications, network communications, image processing and other applications.

Compared with the strict authorization mechanism of mainstream architectures such as X86 and Arm, RISC-V has been determined to take the path of openness, sharing, and security since its inception. However, there are still many domestic companies accustomed to "downloading but not uploading", which is contrary to the core concept of RISC-V open source. But this is also the mentality of general companies at this stage, focusing on using resources but less on sharing resources.

Regarding this issue, Lin Zhiming emphasized the need to correctly understand the openness of RISC-V: "For the RISC-V ecosystem, if you want it to develop healthily, you can't just download without contributing and sharing." At the same time, he suggested that companies can be required to open some research and development content after downloading and completing development, and keep the more confidential parts, so as to strike a balance between following the rules of the game and allowing the company to survive. The license can refer to the open source software licensing model of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).

It is worth mentioning that due to the intensification of the Sino-US trade war, some industry insiders have analyzed that if both sides take a tough stance, it may be relatively difficult for the US-based RISC-V, but more favorable for the Japanese company Arm. In this regard, Lin Zhiming told Jiwei.com reporters that from the current perspective, the Sino-US trade war has not had an impact on the development of RISC-V.

Although the RISC-V Foundation has attracted many companies to participate, Lin Zhiming also admitted that "RISC-V is not very common yet." Of course, the establishment of an ecosystem is not achieved overnight, so Lin Zhiming is still optimistic and said that although the overall RISC-V ecosystem is not mature enough, he still expects RISC-V to have a high market share in the embedded CPU market in the future by learning from the successful precedent of Android, which is also an open source.