A new RISC-V initiative announced last week by five leading chip players is a direct result of the more aggressive stance Arm is taking in its licensing terms as it tries to increase its revenues as a function of its upcoming IPO and its future as a publicly traded company.
Qualcomm posted an announcement Aug. 4 on behalf of itself and four companies, saying the five investors are creating a company in Germany. It will “accelerate the commercialization of future products based on the open-source RISC-V architecture. The company will be a single source to enable compatible RISC-V-based products, provide reference architectures and help establish solutions widely used in the industry. Initial application focus will be automotive, but with an eventual expansion to include mobile and IoT. “
RISC-V certainly is not as advanced or has as many systems capabilities as Arm IP, but it presents a way for fabless chip companies to control their own destinies and not have to worry about future licensing changes and royalty uncertainty that can negatively affect margins in some very competitive commodity markets.
There is no doubt that unintended consequences of Arm licensing uncertainty has accelerated this decision for Qualcomm, NXP Semiconductors, Bosch, Nordic Semiconductor and Infineon Technologies to move to alternatives to Arm IP. And RISC-V being an Open-Source instruction environment will also enable much more competition and circuit customization than a defined ARM architecture allows.This announcement is also a way for leading European companies to assert themselves in the critical automotive industry at a time when the number of chips and complexity of those chips in vehicles is skyrocketing.
Having an alternative architecture is critical to companies that require fully customized implementations optimized to each company's needs. And with major fabs already committed to support of RISC-V, getting product built will not be an issue. It remains to be seen how quickly this will have an effect on the market, but it's likely to be significant in the next 2-3 years.
And because many automotive chips stay in production for 7-10 years or longer, it's a major savings in royalties for the chipmakers and car companies, and a long-term disadvantage for Arm recurring revenues. While this announcement is geared towards automotive, I expect to see a number of other industries move in a similar direction.
Jack Gold is founder and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, LLC. With more than 45 years of experience in the computer and electronics industries, and as an industry analyst for more than 25 years, he covers the many aspects of business and consumer computing and emerging technologies. Follow him on Twitter @jckgld or LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jckgld.