The RISC-V Foundation today announced that the RISC-V Foundation’s membership has surpassed 235 organizations, individuals, academics and universities from 27 countries and six continents around the world. The RISC-V ecosystem has experienced explosive growth since the RISC-V Foundation’s inception in 2015, with more than 100 percent membership growth over the past year. There has been an increased commercial adoption and a growing number of implementations, including an expanding footprint in China and the wider APAC region.
“RISC-V is changing the way companies innovate, reshaping the silicon landscape through open standard collaboration. We’ve reached a critical mass of companies adopting RISC-V and actively contributing to the ecosystem,” said Martin Fink, interim CEO of the RISC-V Foundation and Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Western Digital. “It’s exciting, we’re at a point where we have a viable alternative to general purpose compute architectures. Based on our growth over past year, it is evident that other organizations are embracing RISC-V. ”
Companies around the world are taking advantage of the flexibility, scalability and extensibility of RISC-V as an alternative to closed, proprietary ISAs. RISC-V has been designed into a wide variety of applications including graphics engines, machine learning and AI, networking, storage, security, embedded and general purpose processors. There is also a growing ecosystem of OS support, development tools, FPGA softcores, IP and design services. The expansive RISC-V ecosystem includes Platinum RISC-V Foundation members Antmicro, Berkeley Architecture Research, Bluespec, C-SKY, Cortus, Google, Marvell, Microchip Technology, Micron Technology, NVIDIA, NXP, Orion, Qualcomm, Rambus Inc., Samsung, Sanechips Technology Co., SiFive, Thales and Western Digital.
This membership milestone follows a year of significant RISC-V ecosystem momentum. In 2018, the RISC-V Foundation formed the Security Standing Committee to bring together industry leaders to share findings, develop consensus around best security practices and identify potential security improvements for RISC-V based Internet of Things (IoT) devices, embedded systems and machine learning implementations.
To build on the RISC-V Foundation’s growing footprint in China across more than 25 companies and universities, the organization formed the China Advisory Committee to further accelerate adoption of the RISC-V ISA in the region. The RISC-V Foundation also announced a joint collaboration with the Linux Foundation to grow the RISC-V community with improved support for the development of new applications and architectures across all computing platforms.
Last year the RISC-V Foundation held a number of successful events across Asia, North America and Europe, including the RISC-V Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. where more than 1,100 attendees from over 20 countries gathered to discuss RISC-V implementations and share findings. The next RISC-V Foundation event, the RISC-V Workshop Taiwan, will be held in Hsinchu, Taiwan from March 12-13, 2019. The RISC-V Workshop Zurich will take place in Zurich, Switzerland from June 11-13, 2019.
