In this context of an open ecosystem for business, semiconductor giants Samsung and Qualcomm revealed some of their plans to adopt RISC-V on a significant scale. At Microchip, we announced the opening of the early access program for the PolarCire® FPF SoC family, which features a hardened RISC-V processor subsystem embedded in our low-power, highly reliable, and secure PolarFire FPGA fabric. None of this would be possible without the growing RISC-V ecosystem.
Over the past five years, at Microchip we haven't been in the business of predicting the future of RISC-V. On the contrary, we, along with many others, have been creating the future of RISC-V to bring the ecosystem to where it is today. The near future we need to create together in 2020 is to increase investment in software development. We've laid the groundwork with Linux and a broad offering of commercial and open-source RTOSs, and now we need to build complete stacks of solutions for multiple domains, starting with IoT and Linux platforms. This will be a huge undertaking. In addition to the large semiconductor companies already contributing to this effort, we need large systems integrators to contribute because, in many ways, they will be the primary beneficiaries of the innovation that RISC-V is unleashing as developers seek power and cost efficiencies in response to new computing approaches driven by IoT, AI, 5G, automotive, and the data center.
To that end, many leading companies across all domains are already beginning to develop strategies to leverage RISC-V to solve the problems they and their customers face as they enter the new “Golden Age of Computer Architecture.” If you are a CTO at one of these large companies, I can almost guarantee that RISC-V has a role to play in your future. If you don’t have a RISC-V strategy, contact any of the leaders at the RISC-V Foundation to learn how RISC-V can help and join the effort. We need you.
I described the future we need to create, so I suppose that means expecting to see leading systems integrators begin to articulate their RISC-V strategies and start contributing to the next layer of software stacks built across multiple domains. Of course, much of this effort will leverage the release of tools, silicon, and boards for products like the PolarCire FPGA SoCs. If you'd like to learn more about how the RISC-V ecosystem is growing, we recorded this short video with some of the companies we work with as part of my keynote address. Click here: https://youtu.be/SzmBDFvqWE0
Ted Speers is a technical fellow at Microchip Technology and head of architecture and product planning for its FPGA business unit. He is also a member of the RISC-V Foundation's Board of Directors.
