The open-source RISC-V instruction set continues to make inroads across the electronics industry. Electronic Design’s and Microwaves & RF’s Bill Wong offers his take on the current status and future of the technology.
A great deal of attention has been directed toward the RISC-V development community and IP ecosystem, with many companies starting to explore and adopt the open-source solution in their products and processes.
Considering it all began in 2010 at the University of California at Berkeley, the RISC-V architecture has taken the industry by storm, with members in over 70 countries. A load-store architecture, RISC-V uses IEEE 754 floating-point instructions with bit field locations that simplify the use of multiplexers in a CPU. A fixed location for the sign bit of immediate values speeds up sign extension.
Designed for a wide range of uses, the base instruction set has a fixed length of 32-bit naturally aligned instructions. The architecture supports variable-length extensions, where each instruction can be any number of 16-bit parcels in length to support small embedded systems as well as large-scale computing. In this podcast, we talk with Bill Wong, Senior Content Director for Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF, about where RISC-V is today and where we think it may be going.
An Army veteran, Alix Paultre was a signals intelligence soldier on the East/West German border in the early ‘80s, and eventually wound up helping launch and run a publication on consumer electronics for the US military stationed in Europe. Alix first began in this industry in 1998 at Electronic Products magazine, and since then has worked for a variety of publications in the embedded electronic engineering space. Alix currently lives in Wiesbaden, Germany.
Also check out his YouTube watch-collecting channel, Talking Timepieces.
