How European Collaboration is Driving an Open Source Revolution in the Chip Space

September 30, 2024

The open source software ‘movement’ has already transformed computer operating systems. Can it do the same for semiconductors? European leaders think so. They have launched a range of initiatives to support the open source chip architecture, RISC-V.

If the geopolitical battles of the 21st century were fought over oil, what is the 21st century equivalent? For many observers, there’s one candidate: semiconductors.

Chips power everything from the smartphone to the giant servers that organize global financial systems.

So it’s no surprise that the world’s superpowers – China, the US, Europe – are jostling to control chip supplies and win the R&D race.

It explains why the European Union passed The European Chips Act  , which entered into force on 21 September 2023. It set aside €43 billion to increase Europe’s semiconductor production capacity from 10 percent of the global market today to 20 percent by 2030.

And there’s one part of the market to which Europe is especially committed: the open-source, royalty-free instruction set architecture (ISA) for semiconductors: RISC-V  .

For decades, the microprocessor market has been dominated by companies such as Arm and Intel that license their chip design IP to companies for a fee. For example, Arm-based chips have powered more than 99 percent of the world’s smartphones  for more than a decade.

But now open source RISC-V  is giving developers the ability to design chips without paying royalties.

One of the EU’s flagship RISC-V projects is the three-year TRISTAN consortium  . Its aim is to create repository of industrial quality RISC-V chip designs in different domains such as automotive, industrial and healthcare.

In other words, TRISTAN  (Together for RISc-V Technology and Applications) will ‘productize’ RISC-V – especially in the area of ‘system on a chip’, which combines many elements of a computer system into a single chip (system memory, graphics processing, radio modems etc.

TRISTAN member companies such as Thales are working hard to make the project a success, and in so doing change the commercials on which the chip market is based.

But before we dive more deeply into the potential impact of the RISC-V revolution, let’s re-cap the history of the wider open source idea.

Software Wants to be Free: The Origins of Open Source

Open source computing emerged in 1991, when engineer Linus Torvalds created a new computer operating system – the Linux operating system kernel  – and released its source code for free.

It was a revolutionary move. Although the idea of open source software (OSS) had been around for decades, Linux made it fly. Linux was competing with well-established operating systems such as Unix and Windows. But it prevailed. Today, it is embedded across the computing landscape  . It underpins Android, and therefore most of the world’s smartphones. It also powers 100 percent of the world’s supercomputers  .

And now, the open source model is making an impact in semiconductors. Which brings is back to RISC-V.

Open Source Comes to Semiconductors

The RISC in RISC-V stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer. Instruction set architectures  are critical. They specify what the processor is capable of doing – and how it gets done. Obviously, ISAs with fewer commands – ‘reduced instruction sets’ – execute faster and use less memory. This is especially important when making chips for mobile and embedded devices, where size and power consumption are limited.

One company, Arm Holdings, spotted the potential for RISC technology early. It developed proprietary licenses in the 1990s and eventually dominated the world of smartphones and connected objects. ARM tech helped smartphone engineers to re-define what is possible in a mobile device  .

But RISC-V offers an alternative to Arm – and other proprietary ISAs such as Intel’s x86. We can list its benefits as follows:

• Flexible: developers can customize for specific use cases, resulting in faster development cycles and better performance · Autonomous: developers can fine-tune their systems without relying on third parties or incurring additional license fees
• Visible: it’s open so developers can have more visibility into the code base · Affordable: open source so no license fee – and also no need to buy a commercial chip with more capability than needed · Independence: a privately-owned ISA brings the risk of export bans and other restrictions. With open source, there’s no owner to restrict access.

RISC-V has made a lot of progress. Its non-profit governing body  was founded in 2015 and now has 3,950 members across 70 countries including Google, Qualcomm, Intel and Nvidia.

The project is genuinely global. This summer’s RISC-V Summit welcomed attendees from 40 countries. Already, companies all over the world are already adopting the tech. The top ten RISC-V startups in China  are estimated to have funding of over $1 billion. And in the US, startup SiFive raised 5 million  to value the company at over $2.5 billion. In August 2024, it launched its first RISC-V solution for data centres.

Europe’s Tech Sector Commits to RISC-V

However, as explained in the introduction, there is particular support for RISC-V across Europe. In 2022, the European Union confirmed €270 million in funds  to support the technology. The EU ’s commitment to RISC-V is part of a broader strategy to close the gap with its counterparts in the US and Asia Pac. There’s also a security dimension. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted Europe's dependency on Chinese semiconductor supply chains. It demonstrated the need for an autonomous European ecosystem.

European activity around RISC-V is already accelerating. In 2023, the EU launched an initiative  between the EU’s EuroHPC body and a consortium of industry firms, research organizations and institutions. It wants to build an EU-wide RISC-V ecosystem to embed the tech in mass market products.

Moving RISC-V from concept to product

The three-year TRISTAN consortium  is a central component of this effort to build a European sovereign alternative to existing proprietary players. As a leader in digital security for connected devices such as industrial sensors and software-defined vehicles, Thales is deeply committed to TRISTAN. Jean-Roch Coulon, RISC-V Processor Architect at Thales, says the hardware dimension of the project is especially important.

“In any big industry collaboration, it’s always harder to tackle hardware than software,” he says. “It’s not easy to share hardware insights. You need tools and verification, and this takes a lot of time and resources. This is much easier in the software space, which is probably 20 years ahead. So TRISTAN is an important project if we want Europe to have its own sovereignty in chip hardware, and not be reliant on private overseas platforms.”

From TRISTAN to ISOLDE

The follow-up to TRISTAN is (inevitably) called ISOLDE. Its mission is to take RISC-V hardware designs from concept to near-commercial adoption. More specifically, the project has stated that designs should achieve technology readiness (TRL) 7. This means that by 2026, the participants will have “demonstrated RISC-V hardware designs in an operational environment.”

Away from Europe, there is another influential body driving the RISC-V vision forward. This is the OpenHW Group  . Thales is one of the 100 plus members that are developing the organization’s CORE-V family of open-source RISC-V processors. To date, the CV40 core has been shipped over 500 million times  .

For Jean-Roch Coulon, these developments help Thales to pay its part in the evolution of RISC-V and form new alliances. “We need to be on the RISC-V train,” he says. “Working on projects like TRISTAN, ISOLDE and Open HW has enabled us to collaborate with organizations we have not worked with before. We now have relationships with some of Europe’s biggest chip companies, and also the best academic institutes. This is fantastic. It means we can adapt to the best new ideas and stay ahead of the competition.”

16 Billion RISC-V Chips in Play by 2030?

Ten years after its birth, the open source semiconductor ‘movement’ is gaining ground. According to RISC-V International, RISC-V architecture has already been used inside over a billion chips. The organization is predicting more than 16 billion unit shipments by 2030. And it believes that 27 percent of AI accelerators for automotive could be based on RISC-V by the same year.

Meanwhile, there have been some notable ‘wins’ in the commercial sector. Chip designer Qualcomm plans to embed RISC-V in the chips that power Android wearable devices  . And, remarkably, Intel joined RISC-V International  and even launched a $1 billion fund to support RISC-V based startups. Intel, remember, offers its own commercial ISA: x86.

Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, believes these developments show that momentum behind open source in semiconductors is now unstoppable  . She says: “RISC-V is absolutely the definition of open computing…It’s here already. It’s going across all domains in computing. It is inevitable.”

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