Reshaping chip rules, new breakthrough for domestic RISC-V

Competition in the global semiconductor industry is becoming increasingly fierce. RISC-V (fifth-generation reduced instruction set computer) is expected to rewrite the competitive landscape of the chip market with its advantages such as open source. As the international situation continues to complicate, RISC-V provides an accelerated path for China to achieve independent control in the field of processor design. In recent years, driven by policy support, industrial investment and the advantages of the RISC-V architecture itself, China has become the main center for RISC-V development and application in the world, and domestic RISC-V chips are accelerating their breakthrough and rise.

RISC-V is rising rapidly, and the ecological chain is booming

RISC-V was born from an academic study at the University of California, Berkeley around 2010. Its original intention was to create a new instruction set architecture (ISA) that is modern, simple, scalable, and not bound by the legacy issues and intellectual property rights of existing architectures (such as ARM and x86).

Open source is the core concept of RISC-V, which aims to promote collaboration and widespread adoption. By providing a high-quality, open standard ISA, and exempting royalties and licensing fees, RISC-V fundamentally changes the economics of chip design, challenging the proprietary model established by ARM, Intel, AMD and other companies for decades.

RISC-V greatly reduces the threshold for chip design, which enables startups, small and medium-sized enterprises and research institutions to innovate at a lower cost.

With the advantages of open source, free, and highly scalable, RISC-V has rapidly penetrated into AIoT, edge computing, automotive electronics and other fields, and the market space is constantly opening up.

The industry pointed out that at present, RISC-V has become the third largest CPU architecture after x86 and ARM architecture. At the same time, the RISC-V ecosystem is booming. The global RISC-V Foundation has more than 4,000 members, covering more than 50 countries, and has formed a complete ecological layout from IP, design to application on a global scale.

China is an important participant in the RISC-V industry, which is currently experiencing diversified development: there are not only technology giants such as Alibaba Pingtouge, Huawei, and Tencent, which are senior members of RISC-V International and have invested heavily in core development and ecological construction; there are also professional IP suppliers such as Xinlai Technology; and SoC and chip designers such as Saifang Technology and Ruisi Xinke; other important members include VeriSilicon, Eswi Computing, Feiteng Information, Lenovo, Great Wall, etc.

China’s efforts, new breakthroughs in domestic RISC-V chips

my country’s “14th Five-Year Plan” clearly proposes the development of RISC-V architecture chips. At the same time, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology promotes the open source chip ecosystem cultivation plan, and local governments have also set up special funds to support RISC-V. Under the policy empowerment, domestic RISC-V manufacturers continue to rise, and RISC-V has made a new round of breakthroughs recently.

01 China’s first fully self-developed high-performance RISC-V server chip released

Recently, Shenzhen, China, officially released its new generation of high-performance processors-Lingyu in Qianhai. As China’s first fully self-developed high-performance RISC-V server chip, Lingyu has reached the international mainstream level in terms of computing power, energy efficiency and interface configuration, meeting the application scenarios of high-performance computing, all-flash storage and open source large language models such as Deepseek.

Based on the company’s self-developed CPU core IP and on-chip network IP, Lingyu processors have achieved advanced out-of-order execution, high-speed data paths and Mesh interconnection structures. At the same time, through the design-process collaborative optimization of software and hardware, innovations have been achieved in product engineering, EDA tool chain, physical design and wafer manufacturing processes, significantly improving the energy efficiency ratio in computing and optimizing the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Lingyu’s computing performance is comparable to that of international mainstream server chips such as Intel and AMD, pushing RISC-V into the high-performance era. In terms of memory and I/O interface support, Lingyu processors support DDR5 high-speed memory, PCIe 5.0 standard and CXL 2.0 protocol, and support up to 8-way interconnection. At the same time, Lingyu processors have enterprise-level RAS features, meet RISC-V server standards, have built-in dedicated management cores and support dynamic adjustment, ensure the stability of high-load operation, and meet the needs of enterprise-level data centers.

At present, the Lingyu processor ecosystem has gathered more than 50 partners, covering key component manufacturers, whole machine OEMs, system software and industry solutions.

Some people in the industry believe that the release of Lingyu processor is not only a major technological breakthrough, but also has a more far-reaching significance. The early applications of RISC-V were concentrated in the MCU and embedded fields. Lingyu clearly targeted servers and directly compared performance with Intel/AMD. This confirms the architectural scalability envisioned by RISC-V supporters and supports the trend of RISC-V expanding to more demanding market areas.

02 The world’s first 32-bit RISC-V architecture microprocessor based on two-dimensional semiconductor materials is launched

In April this year, the official microblog of Fudan University announced that two-dimensional semiconductor chips have achieved a milestone breakthrough. Zhou Peng and Bao Wenzhong’s joint team from the National Key Laboratory of Integrated Chips and Systems of Fudan University successfully developed the world’s first 32-bit RISC-V architecture microprocessor “WUJI” based on two-dimensional semiconductor materials (molybdenum disulfide MoS2). The relevant results were published in the journal Nature on the evening of April 2, Beijing time.

The chip integrates 5,900 transistors through independent innovative special integration technology and open source simplified instruction set computing architecture (RISC-V), achieving the largest scale verification record of two-dimensional logic chips in the world.

RISC-V, as an open source simplified instruction set computing architecture, has gradually become the mainstream choice in the current chip research and development field. The chip developed this time uses the RISC-V architecture as the design basis.

Han Jun, a researcher at the School of Microelectronics, is responsible for the RISC-V architecture design in this work. He introduced that choosing this architecture means connecting to global technical standards without relying on closed architectures, and can independently build a user ecosystem in the future without being restricted by the architecture and IP patents of foreign manufacturers.

03 Xinlai Technology and Silergy jointly promote the localization process of RISC-V automotive chips

Recently, Xinlai Technology focused on demonstrating the successful application of its NA900 series high-performance RISC-V processor IP in Silergy SA32D series automotive MCUs.

Xinlai Technology pointed out that the SA32D series MCU uses Xinlai Technology’s 6-core NA900 RISC-V CPU IP, creating a number of industry breakthroughs:

Performance: The SA32D MCU equipped with NA900 IP achieves an efficient computing power of 4.6KDMIPS at 300MHz, and is significantly ahead of the same-level MCU based on Cortex-R5 and R52 in Dhrystone and Coremark running points.

Functional safety: The solution has passed ISO 26262 ASIL-D certification, meeting the most stringent safety requirements of automotive electronics. It is the first high-performance ASIL-D automotive MCU based on RISC-V in China.

Silicon has become the only semiconductor manufacturer in China that can provide ASIL-D MCU + ASIL-D PMIC sets.

Xinlai Technology pointed out that RISC-V is revolutionizing the automotive industry with an open and flexible architecture. Especially in terms of functional safety and information security, the customizable characteristics of RISC-V enable it to quickly adapt to the evolution of automotive electronics.

結論

In the past 15 years, RISC-V has gradually moved from academic laboratories to the main battlefield of the chip industry, and has continuously moved from the Internet of Things and embedded systems to the high-performance field. In the future, the chip revolution triggered by RISC-V will continue, and the industry continues to be optimistic about its development in the fields of AI and automotive electronics.

The scalability of RISC-V enables it to optimize AI/ML tasks through custom instruction sets or dedicated accelerators. It is considered to be particularly suitable for AI inference loads. Many manufacturers are actively developing RISC-V solutions for AI; due to the growing demand for low power consumption, high performance, customization and functional safety in the automotive industry, the application of RISC-V in the automotive field will continue to accelerate. Application scenarios include advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), infotainment systems, powertrain control units, and vehicle-mounted MCUs.

At the same time, as RISC-V continues to reshape the chip industry landscape, a new era of open and diverse computing has begun. Chinese manufacturers will continue to achieve “core” breakthroughs in the RISC-V field and jointly write the future of chip rules with global manufacturers.