Looking Back on 2021: Strong Growth Momentum of RISC-V Market

February 7, 2022 -- As more and more international technology companies are embracing RISC-V and expanding their market and applications, Andes is determined to continue to drive the RISC-V momentum as the leading pure play processor IP vendor. By leveraging years of extensive experience helping customers achieve mass production of diversified products, Andes will support even more RISC-V SoC design teams to introduce innovative products. Looking ahead to 2022, Andes will recruit more R&D talents around the world. Based on the solid foundation of product portfolio, Andes will extend it to cover more high-value and high-end products and address the demand for high-performance RISC-V computing solutions and grow along with the booming market. Here, let’s go over the milestones Andes achieved in 2021.

New Milestones

• Andes achieved record high annual revenue of NT$819 million in 2021, which represents 41 percent year-over-year growth.
• The monthly revenue of December hit record high of NT$137 million.
• Annual shipment of SoCs embedded with Andes CPU cores reached 3 billion in 2021 which represents over 50 percent year-over-year growth. Since inception, the cumulative shipments surpassed a remarkable record of 10 billion.
• As of 2021, the cumulative number of IP license contracts exceeded 370. Design wins included many leading companies, such as MediaTek, Renesas, SK Telecom, EdgeQ, HPMicro, Kneron and many others.
• The applications of Andes’ licensees are diversified. The top five customer applications are AI, Touch Panel, Wireless/IoT, MCU and 5G in 2021.
• Over 20,000 installations of AndeSight™ IDE.

Innovative Products

• Andes RISC-V superscalar multicore A(X)45MP and vector Processor NX27V upgraded their spec and performance.
• Andes released AndeSight™ IDE v5.0: a comprehensive software solution to accelerate RISC-V AI and IoT developments.
• Andes launched AndesBoardFarm to enable SoC designers to explore and evaluate Andes’ RISC-V processors in online FPGA board collection.
• COPILOT (Custom-OPtimized Instruction deveLOpment Tools™) v5.4 was upgraded with additional Streaming Port feature.

Strategic Partnership

• More than 500 ecosystem partners.
• Ashling’s RiscFree™ Toolchain extended to support the broad range of Andes RISC-V CPU IPs.
• Andes partnered with Codeplay Software to achieve software first SoC design for AI-based applications using RISC-V vector processors.
• Andes and Cyberon collaborated to provide edge-computing voice recognition solution on DSP-capable RISC-V processors.
• IAR Systems extended development tools performance capabilities for Andes RISC-V cores.
• Andes partnered with PUFsecurity to integrate crypto coprocessor PUFiot into RISC-V AIoT security platform.
• Andes and Rafael Microelectronics announced a strategic partnership to provide high power efficiency wireless IP solutions for IoT devices.
• Andes collaborated with Rambus to offer secure solution for MCU and IoT applications.
• Silex Insight and Andes Technology extended strategic partnership to deliver flexible and scalable root-of-trust security IP solution.

Global Presence

• Andes issued its overseas Global Depositary Receipt (GDR) on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange, making Andes the only international public RISC-V CPU IP supplier. The funding allows Andes to boost investing in R&D and expanding its RISC-V product lines, especially high-end products.
• To seize the market of high-end multicore CPU IPs, Andes’ design centers in Taiwan, United States and Canada launched an expansion plan to recruit 200 R&D talents in the coming 3-5 years to develop the next-generation RISC-V products.
• Jonah McLeod, Marketing Director of Andes Technology USA Corp., was elected as Chair of Marketing Committee of RISC-V International Association to lead its members around the world to promote RISC-V applications and expand ecosystem.

Awards & Accolades

• Andes won “Mittelstand Award” held by Minister of Economic Affairs in Taiwan with its unique and highly competitive technology.
• Andes won “Featured IoT Cybersecurity Chip Supplier” of 2021 EE Awards Asia hosted by EE Times and EDN. Its vector processor IP NX27V also won “Best EDA/IP of the Year” in the product category.
• Frankwell Lin, Chairman and CEO, was awarded “Outstanding Manager Award” by Professional Management Association of Hsinchu, Taiwan.
• Dr. Charlie Su, President and CTO, won RISC-V Technical Contributor Award in recognition of his contribution as Vice Chair of the RISC-V International Technical Steering Committee.

Event Presence

• At 2021 RISC-V Summit, Andes presented four talks covering the hottest RISC-V technology development and applications, including AndesCore™, IOPMP, TVM auto-scheduler and Zephyr RTOS.
• Andes hosted nearly 40 RISC-V webinars and meetups, including RISC-V CON Hsinchu and RISC-V CON China, to share new market trends and the latest technologies with 3,000+ RISC-V enthusiasts all over the world.
• Andes joined more than 50 major industry events and presented over 80 technical talks around the world to promote and reach customers despite the pandemic. The events included AI Hardware Summit, AIoT Taiwan, China Semiconductor Executive Summit, ChipEx, ChipExpo, Clientron Automotive Forum, Cloud & Fog Computing Ecosystem Forum, COMPUTEX, CTHPC, DATE, EE Awards Asia Ceremony, ELEXCON, Embedded World, GSA Asia-Pacific Executive Forum: 5G panel, GSA Silicon Leadership Summit, ICCAD, IP SoC Day Grenoble, Linley Fall Conference, Micro-Electronics Wearables Forum, RISC-V Forum (Security/ Developer Tools/ Embedded Technologies/ Vector & Machine Learning), RISC-V Meetup (Austin/Boston), RISC-V Summit, RISC-V Taipei Day, RISC-V Tokyo Day (Spring/Fall), RISC-V Week, RISC-V World Conference China, SemIsrael, TechTaipei, TSMC OIP Forum (NA/CN/EMEA), TSMC Technology Symposium (NA/TW/EMEA), VLSI-CAD, VLSI-DAT and many others.