How European collaboration is driving an open source revolution in the chip space

Open-source software reshaped computing. Can it do the same for semiconductors?  

Chips power everything from smartphones to financial servers, driving a global race between China, the US, and Europe for supply and innovation.

The European Chips Act, effective September 2023, invests €43 billion to double Europe’s semiconductor output to 20% by 2030. There’s one part of the market to which Europe is especially committed: the open-source, royalty-free instruction set architecture (ISA) for semiconductors: RISC-V. 

For years, the microprocessor market has been dominated by companies such as Arm and Intel that licence their chip design IP to companies for a fee. Arm-based chips have powered more than 99 % of the world’s smartphones for more than a decade. Now open source RISC-V is giving developers the ability to design chips without paying royalties. 

One of the EU’s flagship RISC-V projects is the 3 year TRISTAN consortium. Its aim is to create repository of industrial quality RISC-V chip designs in different domains such as automotive, industrial and healthcare. TRISTAN (Together for RISc-V Technology and ApplicatioNs) will ‘productise’ RISC-V –in the area of ‘system on a chip’, which combines many elements of a computer system into a single chip (system memory, graphics processing, radio modems (etc). 

TRISTAN members like Thales are working hard to make the project a success, and in so doing change the commercials on which the chip market is based.  

Software wants to be free: the origins of open source

Open source computing emerged in 1991, when engineer Linus Torvalds created a new computer operating system – the Linux operating system kernel – and released its source code for free.  

It was a revolutionary move. Although the idea of open source software (OSS) had been around for decades, Linux made it fly. Linux was competing with well-established operating systems such as Unix and Windows. Today, it is embedded across the computing landscape. It underpins Android, and therefore most of the world’s smartphones. It also powers 100% of the world’s supercomputers. Now, the open source model is making an impact in semiconductors. Here comes RISC-V. 

Open source comes to semiconductor

The RISC in RISC-V stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer. Instruction set architectures are critical. They specify what the processor is capable of doing – and how it gets done. Obviously, ISAs with fewer commands – ‘reduced instruction sets’ – execute faster and use less memory. This is especially important when making chips for mobile and embedded devices, where size and power consumption are limited. 

Arm Holdings, spotted the potential for RISC technology early. It developed proprietary licences in the 1990s and eventually dominated the world of smartphones and connected objects. ARM tech helped smartphone engineers to re-define what is possible in a mobile device. 

But not RISC-V offers an alternative to Arm – and other proprietary ISAs such as Intel’s x86. We can list its benefits as follows: 

• Flexible: developers can customise for specific use cases, resulting in faster development cycles and better performance. 
• Autonomous: developers can fine-tune their systems without relying on third parties or incurring additional license fees.
• Visible: it’s open so developers can have more visibility into the code base.
• Affordable: open source so no licence fee – and also no need to buy a commercial chip with more capability than needed.
• Independence: a privately-owned ISA brings the risk of export bans and other restrictions. With open source, there’s no owner to restrict access. 

Founded in 2015, RISC-V International now has 3,950 members, including Google, Qualcomm, Intel, and Nvidia. The project is genuinely global. This summer’s RISC-V Summit welcomed attendees from 40 countries. Already, companies all over the world are already adopting the tech. The top ten RISC-V startups in China are estimated to have funding of over $1 billion. And in the US, startup SiFive raised $175 million to value the company at over $2.5 billion. In August 2024, it launched its first RISC-V solution for data centres. 

Europe’s tech sector commits to RISC-V

The EU allocated €270 million to RISC-V in 2022, aiming to reduce reliance on Chinese supply chains and compete with the US and Asia. European activity around RISC-V is already accelerating. In 2023, the EU launched an initiative between the EU’s EuroHPC body and a consortium of industry firms, research organisations and institutions. It wants to build an EU-wide RISC-V ecosystem to embed the tech in mass market products. 

Moving RISC-V from concept to product

The three-year TRISTAN consortium is a central component of this effort to build a European sovereign alternative to existing proprietary players. As a leader in digital security for connected devices such as industrial sensors and software-defined vehicles, Thales is deeply committed to TRISTAN. Jean-Roch Coulon, RISC-V Processor Architect at Thales, says the hardware dimension of the project is especially important.  

“In any big industry collaboration, it’s always harder to tackle hardware than software,” he says. “It’s not easy to share hardware insights. You need tools and verification, and this takes a lot of time and resources. This is much easier in the software space, which is probably 20 years ahead. So TRISTAN is an important project if we want Europe to have its own sovereignty in chip hardware, and not be reliant on private overseas platforms.” 

From TRISTAN to ISOLDE

The follow-up to TRISTAN is (inevitably) called ISOLDE. Its mission is to take RISC-V hardware designs from concept to near-commercial adoption. More specifically, the project has stated that designs should achieve technology readiness (TRL) 7. This means that by 2026, the participants will have “demonstrated RISC-V hardware designs in an operational environment.” 

Away from Europe, there is another influential body driving the RISC-V vision forward. This is the OpenHW Group. Thales is one of the 100 plus members that are developing the organisation’s CORE-V family of open-source RISC-V processors. To date, the CV40 core has been shipped over 500 million times.  

For Jean-Roch Coulon, these developments help Thales to pay its part in the evolution of RISC-V and form new alliances. “We need to be on the RISC-V train,” he says. “Working on projects like TRISTAN, ISOLDE and Open HW has enabled us to collaborate with organisations we have not worked with before. We now have relationships with some of Europe’s biggest chip companies, and also the best academic institutes. This is fantastic. It means we can adapt to the best new ideas and stay ahead of the competition.” 

16 billion RISC-V chips in play by 2030?

Ten years after its birth, the open source semiconductor ‘movement’ is gaining ground. According to RISC-V International, RISC-V architecture has already been used inside over a billion chips. The organisation is predicting more than 16 billion unit shipments by 2030. And it believes that 27% of AI accelerators for automotive could be based on RISC-V by the same year.  

Meanwhile, there have been some notable ‘wins’ in the commercial sector. Chip designer Qualcomm plans to embed RISC-V in the chips that power Android wearable devices. And, remarkably, Intel joined RISC-V International and even launched a $1 billion fund to support RISC-V based startups. Intel, remember, offers its own commercial ISA: x86. 

Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, believes these developments show that momentum behind open source in semiconductors is now unstoppable. 

TRISTAN has received funding from the Chips Joint Undertaking under the grant agreement nr. 101095947 and from participating states Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, Turkey.  For France, the project is supported by the French government as part of France 2030.  

The ISOLDE project has received funding from the Chips Joint Undertaking under grant agreement nr. 101112274 and from participating states are Austria, Czechia, France, Germany, Italy, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland.