RISC-V Foundation chief executive officer Calista Redmond has written of increasing momentum for RISC-V, as the semiconductor industry begins to shift away from proprietary closed-source core.

“Interest in RISC-V has been gaining steam with commercial implementations and adoption rapidly growing. It has been incredible to witness how RISC-V has fostered industry-wide collaboration to solve tomorrow’s design needs, including some of the toughest challenges like security,” Redmond writes in an update on the Foundation’s progress. “Here’s why RISC-V is changing the face of the silicon industry.

“The RISC-V ISA allows us to start with a clean sheet of paper and optimize designs for new workloads, ushering in a new era of silicon design and processor innovation through open standard collaboration. This open source approach to silicon has many benefits.

“We’ve seen that RISC-V: 1) Unlocks architecture and enables innovation since RISC-V is a layered and extensible ISA, companies can easily implement the minimal instruction set, well defined extensions and custom extensions to create custom processors for these new and innovative workloads. 2) Reduces risk and investment via leverage of established and common IP building blocks with a growing set of shared tools and development resources with an engaged development community. 3) Creates opportunities to create thousands of possible custom processors as implementation is not defined at the ISA level, but rather by the composition of the SoC and other design attributes. It’s possible to go big, small, powerful, or lightweight. 4) Accelerates time to market through collaboration and open source IP reuse, this not only reduces development expense, but accelerates time to market.”

Redmond’s comments come at a time when the RISC-V Foundation has grown to over 325 members in 28 countries and an increasing number of commercial products featuring RISC-V cores, from human-machine interface devices and solid-state drives to AI accelerators, are reaching the market; it also comes as RISC-V faces increasing pressure from rival free and open source silicon projects, most notably the recently-opened Power instruction set architecture.

Redmond’s full post is available on the RISC-V Foundation blog.