Ni Guangnan: We can properly focus on the RISC-V architecture, and then grasp the initiative of the chip industry development

Jiwei network news, On December 20, the 16th China Core Integrated Circuit Industry Promotion Conference and the release ceremony of the "China Core" Excellent Product Collection Activity were held in Zhuhai, and Ni Guangnan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, pointed out in his speech that China can appropriately focus on the RISC-V architecture to develop the chip industry, so as to seize the opportunity of rapid development of China's chip industry, and is not constrained by foreign monopoly architectures, and firmly grasps the initiative in the development of the chip industry in its own hands.

Academician Ni Guangnan said that the CPU (central processing unit) architecture is the leader of the chip industry chain, which not only determines the performance of the CPU, but also leads the entire chip industry to a large extent. In particular, it has a significant impact on the training of design talents, design tools (EDA), chip IP libraries, application ecology, etc., in addition, it also affects the production, testing, packaging and other aspects of chips. In recent years, the proportion of SoC products containing microprocessors in chip products has increased to more than 70%, which shows that the impact of CPU architecture on the chip industry is continuing to grow.

Academician Ni Guangnan believes that after the development of China's chip industry in recent years, some companies have made great achievements in the industry, and there are already a number of domestic CPU architectures coexisting in the market (such as Feiteng, Huawei, Shenwei, Longxin, Haiguang, Zhaoxin, etc.). However, in the long run, the mainstream CPU architecture has a strong monopoly, and the mainstream CPU in the world market in the future is most likely to be monopolized by x86 and ARM, and they are the property rights of American companies. It can be seen that it is difficult to gain a competitive advantage in the existing pattern of coexistence of multiple CPU architectures in China, so that China's chip industry is still difficult to get rid of the situation of being controlled by people.

In recent years, an emerging, open-source RISC-V simplified instruction set CPU architecture has provided opportunities for the chip industry. Academician Ni Guangnan pointed out that the RISC-V architecture was invented by the Computer Science Department of the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, which adopts an open source model, and users can freely use the architecture for CPU design, development and addition of their own instruction set for expansion, and choose whether to publicly issue, or commercially sell, or replace other license agreements, or completely closed source use.

More importantly, the RISC-V Foundation, which leads the open source community, moved from the United States to Switzerland last year, which Academician Ni Guangnan believes can help get rid of the impact of US trade sanctions. In addition, Professor David Patterson, a leader of the foundation, has established a joint laboratory with Tsinghua University in Shenzhen.

Academician Ni Guangnan said that in recent years, after the evaluation and trial of all walks of life in China's domestic education and research, it is generally believed that the RISC-V architecture is advanced and functionally perfect, and it is possible to gain market advantages in the field of AI, IoT, big data, cloud computing, etc., so as to achieve one of the three points in the future world mainstream CPU architecture pattern.

To this end, Academician Ni Guangnan suggested that China can appropriately focus on the RISC-V architecture to develop the chip industry, so as to seize the opportunity of rapid development of China's chip industry, and is not constrained by foreign monopoly architecture, and firmly grasp the initiative in the development of the chip industry in its own hands. In view of the open source model of RISC-V, this does not require a lot of capital investment, but mainly to establish a technical route, organize and mobilize the open source community, open source talents, carry out corresponding policy guidance, etc., in order to give full play to the advantages of China's national system, rich talent advantages and super-large-scale market advantages.

At present, in the field of open source, China's scientific and technological personnel have created some open source communities, and have a considerable right to speak or even a certain degree of dominance, such as OpenEuler, OpenHarmony, etc., which shows that China's open source industry is achieving new innovative breakthroughs, and gradually from an open source country to an open source power. Academician Ni Guangnan said: "In this context, in the near future, we are working with the Institute of Software, some universities and enterprises and other central China Guanghua Science and Technology Foundation to initiate the establishment of the RISC-V Ecological Special Fund, hoping to get strong support from all walks of life, quickly form a driving force to promote the development of China's RISC-V open source chip, making it a cornerstone to support China's information technology system." It is hoped that with the help of the strong vitality of open source, while promoting the development of domestic science and technology, it will also make outstanding contributions to the world open source community. ”

"Let us join the chip industry and our counterparts in the world to embrace the new trend of RISC-V open source chips, make full use of the open source model, and work with world developers to jointly promote the development of open source RISC-V, while contributing to the rapid development of China's chip industry and the construction of a community of human science and technology destiny." Academician Ni Guangnan said so.