Triple Leader: RISC-V Processor IP Market

I have been following RISC-V since 2018 and have interviewed and reported on Hu Zhenbo and Xu Lai, co-founders of Nuractic, Dr. Dai Weimin, Chairman of VeriSilicon, Lin Zhiming, Chairman of Andes Technology, Dr. Su Hongmeng, General Manager of Andes Technology, Dr. Naveed Sherwani, Co-founder of SiFive, and Ms. Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International Foundation. Although RISC-V has developed very well in the domestic processor ecosystem in recent years, my focus on the Fabless 100 ranking of China's IC design industry has not been so timely to track the development trend of RISC-V.

Recently, I was invited to participate in Andes RISC-V CON conference, which gave me the opportunity to refresh my understanding of the latest development of RISC-V, and at the same time, I also gained a new understanding of Andes, which has been focusing on bringing RISC-V to the mainstream market. In keeping with my usual writing style of digging deep into a certain market segment, I also took this opportunity to gather information on RISC-V on the Internet. I was fortunate to find a RISC-V market analysis report released by SHD Group, which was very inspiring, and combined with the rapid development of Andes Technology in recent years, I would like to talk about the current situation and future trend of RISC-V.

In order to better promote the development of RISC-V ecology in the Greater Bay Area, Shenzhen Chip Alliance will jointly hold a RISC-V ecological development forum with RIOS Labs during the Bay Chip Exhibition, and friends who are interested in RISC-V are welcome to contact the organizer.

RISC-V International Open Source Laboratory (RISC-V International Open Source Laboratory) is based on the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Research Institute and is headed by Professor David Patterson, winner of the 2017 Turing Award. Aiming at the new direction of the strategic development of the world's CPU industry and the industrial innovation needs of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the laboratory focuses on the research field of RISC-V open source instruction set CPU, and the related research is oriented to the future layout of intelligent and low-carbon strategic emerging industries, including: frontier exploration of low-energy storage and computing convergence technology, open-source software and hardware integration system and ecological environment construction, from OpenISA instruction set, OpenEDA tools, to OpenPDK tape-out production and other full-core supply chain open source exploration and safe and reliable verification.

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RISC-V-based SoC chips and CPU IP market trends

According to statistics and forecasts reported by SHD Group, RISC-V-based SoC chip shipments and sales will reach $16.2 billion and $92 billion by 2030, respectively, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 44% and 47% during the 2022-2030 period, respectively. In terms of the design application market, consumer electronics applications are the largest market, followed by computer and networking applications.

From a third-party RISC-V IP perspective, the size of this segment is approximately $156 million in 2023 and is expected to grow by 39.% during 2030 and reach $1.6 billion by 2030 (this forecast excludes the emerging chiplet market).

From a supplier perspective, Andes Technology in Taiwan has the largest shipments, accounting for about 30% of the entire market. The other two main suppliers are SiFive in the United States and Xinlai Technology in Chinese mainland. After years of development, the author believes that the global RISC-V CPU commercial IP market has initially formed a three-pronged trend. SiFive is the founder of RISC-V and the leader in high-end RISC-V processor design in the United States, with Siclei being the pioneer and biggest beneficiary of the Chinese market, and Andes being the leader in mainstream RISC-V applications.

If we further break down the RISC-V CPU IP market, as can be seen from the chart above, the total licensing revenue in 2022 is $59.1 million, while the royalties revenue based on shipments is only $16.7 million. This trend is expected to change dramatically in the future, with revenue levels leveling flat by 2027, followed by royalty revenues continuing to grow rapidly to far outpace licensing revenues.

This status and trend can also be seen from Andes' financial report, which shows that in its overall revenue in 2023, IP licensing business accounts for 63%, while royalties account for only 22%. According to Lin Zhiming, chairman of Andes Technology, the current cooperation with RISC-V customers is mainly based on IP licensing, because it takes time for customers to design and ship chips, and royalty revenue needs to wait for 2-3 years before seeing significant growth.

Andes Technology's 2023 Q1-Q4 revenue business model analysis. (Source: Andes Technology)

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The troika that drives the development of RISC-V

The rapid development of RISC-V on a global scale is naturally inseparable from the effective operation and marketing of the RISC-V International Foundation, but the driving forces of the wider ecosystem include the following:

1. The launch of the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE) accelerates the development of open source software for RSIC-V architecture processors;

2. Strong support from industry-leading CPU IP developers, including Andes, SiFive, and Xinlai, GPU IP developer Imagination also fully supports RISC-V, and world-renowned IP supplier Synopsys has also switched its ARC processor cores to RISC-V;

3. Chip and Internet giants such as Intel, Google, Ali and Qualcomm have also joined the RISC-V camp;

4. EDA and development tool vendors have begun to support the development of RISC-V architecture;

5. Qualcomm, NXP, Infineon, Nordic Semiconductors and Bosch and other European companies jointly established an independent company Quintauris in Munich, Germany, specializing in the development of RISC-V compatible products;

6. Renesas uses Andes RISC-V D25F to develop 32-bit and 64-bit MCUs and MPUs.

7.META基于Andes 晶心RISC-V AX25内核开发AI训练和推理加速芯片；

8. Alibaba released a data center AI acceleration chip based on RISC-V core.

In addition, SiFive recently joined the RISC-V Prosperity 2036 initiative jointly initiated by ASE Labs, PLCT Labs, and Sophgo, with the core goal of assisting the industry in developing solutions suitable for commercial applications in various fields around high-performance RISC-V processors and IP such as SG2380 and Xiangshan, aiming to facilitate RISC-V to achieve RISC-V from data center to desktop office in the next 12 years. From mobile wearables to smart Internet of Things, the open standard system and open source system software stack covering the full information industry, and at the same time promote the maturity of the RISC-V software and hardware ecosystem to meet or exceed other mainstream architectures.

From an application-driven perspective, the application markets driving the rapid development of RISC-V are mainly AI, IoT, and automotive. According to Semico's forecast, RISC-V-based AI chips will reach 25 billion by 2027, with sales reaching $291 billion, a growth rate of 73.6%. To capitalize on this market opportunity, Andes has developed a series of RISC-V processor cores for different AI applications, from device-side AIoT, smart cameras, smart home, and mobile AR/VR, to automotive intelligent driving and data center AI training and inference.

According to Counterpoint, RISC-V will account for 28% of the IoT market and 10% of the automotive market by 2025. AndesCore functional safety processors for automotive applications are suitable for a variety of automotive functional safety scenarios, including automotive-grade MCUs and domain controllers, display panels, in-vehicle monitoring, keyless door opening, lighting control, tire pressure monitoring, and visual ADAS. The following is a schematic diagram of the development circuit of its functional safety processor.

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RISC-V生态与Chiplet

Recently, I have been paying more attention to the development of chiplet and advanced packaging as an emerging technology and market, and I have consulted Dr. Su Hongmeng, General Manager of Andes. He sees chiplets as a great opportunity for RISC-V, especially in the design of high-performance computing and AI chips. Intel, AMD, and Nvidia have all adopted chiplets to develop chips for data center and AI acceleration, and Ventana, which focuses on data center applications, has adopted chiplets in the design of its RISC-V processor chips. For RISC-V processor core IP developers like Andes, chiplets will be a new IP business model.

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epilogue

RISC-V, which started as open source, has already made waves around the world, and will form a three-legged trend with the traditional X86 and Arm in the processor ISA field. In the RISC-V processor commercial IP segment, Andes, SiFive, and Xinlai have gradually formed a three-legged trend. Regardless of the architecture, open source or not, you need to grasp the future application development trend. IoT, AI, and intelligent driving are the troika driving RISC-V into the mainstream processor market, with Arm and several RISC-V vendors seizing emerging markets for high-performance computing, desktop computing, and mobile computing. In addition, chiplets will be an emerging business model that IP vendors need to pay close attention to, and whether they can find the right model may determine the future of processor core IP vendors.