Taking a RISC: Expanding Chip Options

By Michael Gurau, Altman Solon
EETimes (February 25, 2022)

After almost two years, the pandemic is still affecting many industries. The initial “stay home” impact of Covid hit air travel, hotels, entertainment, retail and other labor-intensive sectors such as manufacturing. Semiconductor manufacturing has been especially hard hit, leading to a well-publicized shortage of semiconductor chips, particularly in the automotive industry. A study from 2021 pegged the automotive industry’s lost revenue from the chip shortage at $210 billion.

To address the shortage and plan for growth, more than $150 billion in U.S. private and prospective public capital has been directed, committed and/or planned for semiconductor expansion. With high-value M&A transactions and offers, adoption of reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architectures from large and small companies, and a drive by the most affected parties to mitigate geopolitical and supply chain risks, the semiconductor industry has never been more dynamic.

While macro-level trends such as digitization and mobility account for much of the industry’s dynamism, also boosting its growth potential are the current and growing presence and influence of RISC, a simplified design that – for a range of applications – offers better price-performance. Licensed instruction sets – such as those from Arm or open-source RISC-V – enable anyone in the value chain with resources and access to contract manufacturing to compete with large, incumbent players like Intel and Nvidia.

In Nvidia’s case, it’s pursuit of Arm has now been abandoned.

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