Qualcomm, NXP, Bosch and others start company to develop RISC-V chips

Several chipmakers are starting a company together to further develop the RISC-V instruction set architecture. The new company is being set up by Bosch, Infineon, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP and Qualcomm. It will initially focus on automotive chips.

The five companies will jointly invest in setting up a chip company, the parties announced in a statement on Friday. The joint company is aimed at ‘commercializing future products’ based on RISC-V. The company will initially focus on automotive chips. Ultimately, the joint venture wants to expand into mobile and IoT chips.

The new company will, among other things, create reference designs and thereby help expand the application of RISC-V. The company will become a “single source” for developing compatible RISC-V products. The establishment of the joint venture is still subject to regulatory approvals in various regions, the statement said. It is not yet known what investment amounts are involved or when the collaboration will start. The name of the company has also not yet been announced.

RISC-V is an instruction set architecture that is open source, allowing chip designers to design chips based on this ISA free of charge. Other risk architectures, such as Arm’s, are licensed for a fee. Several companies are already active around RISC-V. At the beginning of this year, Google gave the Android platform support for RISC-V. Later this year, Intel and SiFive will release a single-board computer based on a RISC-V SoC. Intel previously invested a billion dollars in the instruction set architecture.