Domain Specific Accelerators Will Drive Vector Processing on RISC-V
By Charlie Cheng, Andes Technology (May 26, 2020)
When the RISC-V market first began, the initial rush was to cost reduce designs that would have otherwise used proprietary CPU instruction set architectures (ISAs) in deeply embedded applications. When these systems on chips (SoCs) began being fabricated in FinFET semiconductor process technology, the mask costs grew so expensive that many finite state machines were replaced with programmable micro sequencers based on the RISC-V instruction set. These created the initial excitement and later on the commoditization of simple RISC-V cores from 2014 to 2018.
As the RISC-V architecture became more mature and SoC designers became familiar with the ISA, it found adoption in real-time applications that demanded high performance: in particular, serving as a front end to highly specialized acceleration engines for applications such as artificial intelligence. One key reason for this adoption is that RISC-V is an open architecture for users to add instructions, so the RISC-V processors did not have to treat the accelerators as memory-mapped I/O devices, as was the case for traditional architectures. Instead, they can use a low-latency co-processor.
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- 64 bit RISC-V Multicore Processor with 2048-bit VLEN and AMM
- RISC-V AI Acceleration Platform - Scalable, standards-aligned soft chiplet IP
- 32 bit RISC-V Multicore Processor with 256-bit VLEN and AMM
- All-In-One RISC-V NPU
- ISO26262 ASIL-B/D Compliant 32-bit RISC-V Core
Related News
- Semidynamics on major recruitment drive for RISC-V software engineers
- Will Apple Drive Analog ICs?
- Wally Rhines: Deep Learning Will Drive Next Wave of Chip Growth
- Moving AI Processing to the Edge Will Shake Up the Semiconductor Industry
Latest News
- CAST Releases First Dual LZ4 and Snappy Lossless Data Compression IP Core
- Arteris Wins “AI Engineering Innovation Award” at the 2025 AI Breakthrough Awards
- SEMI Forecasts 69% Growth in Advanced Chipmaking Capacity Through 2028 Due to AI
- eMemory’s NeoFuse OTP Qualifies on TSMC’s N3P Process, Enabling Secure Memory for Advanced AI and HPC Chips
- AIREV and Tenstorrent Unite to Launch Advanced Agentic AI Stack