Tackling the challenges of RISC-V

By Nick Flaherty, eeNews Europe (April 29, 2022)

Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, talks to Nick Flaherty of eeNews Europe about the challenges facing RISC-V ahead of a major community meeting in Paris next week.

The RISC-V Foundation was founded in 2015 with 29 members, and RISC-V International, based in Switzerland, now has over 2000 members in more than 70 countries. Members are meeting in Paris next week for RISC-V Spring Week 2022.

With all these members, one of the challenges is the risk of fragmentation, RISC-V is an open instruction set for microcontroller and microprocessors where is easy to add extensions, but this can lead to many different versions that could be incompatible. RISC-V International has over 60 tasks groups, rising to 75 this year, working on different areas including the extension definitions, application reference designs and the tool ecosystem.

“One of the things that’s important for us is to find the areas of common ground early and often to bring those into the task groups,” she said. “If four different companies spot the same gap [in the market] how do we get them into the same boat to pool resources? Lets not monetise the base building blocks, there’s plenty of space for them to add their secret source on top.”

“The stronger we can make the organisation and the discipline in creating those extensions, the lower the risk of fragmentation,” she said.

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