Flexible Processor Design with RISC-V
How Open-Source RISC-V Unlocks Processor Design Flexibility
By Adam Kimmel for Mouser Electronics
For over a decade, RISC-V has provided a free and open ISA that fosters processor innovation through open standard collaboration. With so many industries becoming connected, processing power has become one of the few limits of the pace of Industry 4.0. ISA is the link between software and hardware, and creating an open-source removes commercial barriers from newcomers and innovators bringing great ideas to the industry.
Mark Himelstein, CTO of RISC-V International, describes it this way: “Since RISC-V was designed from scratch to last 50 years, the architects took the best practices in the industry and the lessons they had learned and created a paradigm that promotes modularity and allows implementers to select the appropriate instruction groupings (extensions) for their application and workload. RISC-V also supports vendor specific custom extensions to enable differentiated innovation. As a result, implementers have more freedom and end consumers have better products.”
The over 750-member RISC-V consortium does the work while each member reaps the benefits. For example, reducing the code’s size helps the community create a more efficient, streamlined data transmission experience.
A Community of Technology
While the tight-knit community creates an environment of collaborative competition, a challenge that its members ensure is a long product development cycle. The end-to-end process contains a 4−6 month design phase followed by an 18-month commercialization phase. The long commercialization time compels the engineers to consider the impact of time on every area of technology.
Engineers can accelerate development by infusing their expertise into the application of building blocks and adjacent space, adding processing flexibility and mitigating long-lead steps. Networking with “coop-editors” and customers to optimize the applications reduces development time, condensing the schedule by leveraging past development wins.
The transparent, open-source model offers a low entry barrier, without licensing, entry, or royalty fees. This climate invites companies to employ tens of engineers, such as startups and entrepreneurs, to join the community alongside hundreds of engineers. To that point, over 100 members of the group (over 13%) have less than 500 people building a business on RISC-V. Small companies’ relatively high participation rate ratio demonstrates that RISC-V is ideal for small, mid-size, and large companies.
Open-source ISA removes the fear of disclosing application success, aligning members’ motivations singularly to solving the technical problems as fast as possible. The more successful its members are, the more successful the community becomes. The group moves forward with each new application, capturing and sharing lessons learned. Furthermore, with members of varied company sizes, small member companies benefit from the architectures already present in the large member companies.
Differentiation and Flexibility
Diversity and choice are imperative pillars to fast-moving industries. To achieve these pillars, companies must define a flexible and robust product strategy that can incorporate innovations when they arrive. RISC-V provides near-infinite flexibility with its open-source approach, free of restrictions, and pay-to-play barriers. The creators achieved this through the extension methodology.
Engineers and incorporate ISA, the smallest building block, to either small or large implementations. It is technology-independent and ideal for HPC, PC, wearables, embedded, automotive, and space applications. Design teams use all platforms, and they let the problem to solve dictate the solution (either multiple or single).
The flexibility created by these features improves security: specter and meltdown drive the need for security. To ensure system security, programmers can use cryptography, which reduces 1,000 instructions to one. Cryptography extends the data transmission time reduction across architectures to optimize system performance.
Remaining Challenges
A significant remaining challenge is speed. Some non-open source firms are using independent cloud-specific servers. These companies can optimize a system for the application niche(s), but what they gain in specific advantage they lose in agility to incorporate new technology.
Another challenge for community members is waiting for new software versions or implementing them now. An example of this is the vector extension. The software version that a company implements is a snapshot of a point in time on the technology continuum. The balance is whether they should wait for a new version or get to market faster with an existing one. The community provides a useful sounding board for what and when to implement an application.
Conclusion
RISC-V’s open-source approach to ISA invites new applications, strengthening the community. The market contains significant competition, but technologies are used in concert – augmenting existing solutions. RISC-V can expand system architectures or act as a standalone framework. With the growing interest in the technology and a community of over 750 user-members, the technology has a high ceiling and is shifting the market to an open-source ISA model.