RISC-V International is a global non-profit organization that develops and maintains the open RISC-V instruction set architecture standard, enabling companies worldwide to design compatible processors and computing systems.
Can you tell us about the original vision behind RISC-V and what you hope to bring to the organization?
RISC-V is first and foremost an industry standard, similar to USB or Wi-Fi. The specifications are publicly available, meaning companies anywhere in the world can design RISC-V-compliant products. RISC-V International itself is the non-profit organization that coordinates the evolution of that standard, with a strong focus on openness, neutrality, and collaboration across geographies.
The origins go back to UC Berkeley, where Professor David Patterson developed the foundational concepts of Reduced Instruction Set Computing in the early 1980s. In 2010, Dave Patterson, Krste Asanović, Andrew Waterman, and Yunsup Lee created the first RISC-V ISA as an open standard for academia. What started as an academic project quickly attracted commercial interest, leading to the creation of the RISC-V Foundation in 2015 in the United States and eventually moving its headquarters to Switzerland in 2020. Since joining two years ago, my focus has been helping RISC-V expand from a horizontal technology platform into specific industry verticals such as automotive, data centers, space, industrial, and edge computing.
How are you approaching the transition from a horizontal technology platform to a more vertical industry-focused model?
What we are doing is creating special interest groups focused on industries such as automotive, data centers, and space. We bring together domain experts who understand the requirements of those industries with RISC-V technical experts who understand the architecture itself. Together, they map industry-specific needs to RISC-V specifications and create best practices, application notes, and white papers.
In automotive, for example, companies including Infineon, Tenstorrent, SiFive, and Andes are working together on functional safety, real-time processing, and machine learning requirements. In space, we launched a dedicated RISC-V in Space initiative with organizations such as the European Space Agency, Frontgrade Gaisler, and Microchip. One interesting concept discussed there was “Satellite as a Service,” where satellites act almost like cloud computing platforms, creating demanding requirements for security, reliability, redundancy, and workload isolation. Those are exactly the kinds of challenges the RISC-V ecosystem is now addressing collaboratively.
What is driving companies to adopt an open standard like RISC-V, and what gaps still need to be closed?
For academia, the appeal is clear because RISC-V enables easy collaboration through an open standard. For startups, the barrier to entry is dramatically lower because there are no complex legal or commercial licensing frameworks. Companies can immediately start designing products and focus on differentiation and innovation rather than negotiating access to proprietary technology.
For multinational companies and governments, RISC-V offers openness, flexibility, and freedom from single-vendor lock-in. Device makers can work with multiple semiconductor suppliers, semiconductor vendors can work with multiple IP vendors, and everyone benefits from open specifications that no single entity controls. The modular nature of RISC-V also accelerates innovation because companies can optimize designs for specific workloads while contributing successful innovations back into the standard, allowing the ecosystem to share development costs and improve interoperability.
RISC-V operates as a non-profit membership organization in a highly competitive market. How do you maintain the pace of development and standardization required to stay competitive?
One of the most positive surprises for me after joining RISC-V was the energy, enthusiasm, and speed of innovation within the ecosystem. As a non-profit organization funded through annual membership fees, the real work is driven by the members themselves. Companies participate because they need the standard to evolve in ways that support their own business objectives.
If a company requires new AI tensor operations, new security capabilities, or new automotive features, they understand that creating proprietary solutions alone would be more expensive and would lead to compatibility and interoperability issues.
By collaborating on open standards, everyone benefits from faster innovation while still competing aggressively in implementation, performance, power efficiency, and design quality. That balance between collaboration at the standards level and competition at the implementation level is what makes the ecosystem move so quickly.
What is your strategy for growing RISC-V adoption and membership over the coming years?
A major part of our strategy is continuing to expand into industry verticals where we see strong demand for new capabilities. According to projections from SHD Group, RISC-V market penetration could grow from 2.5% in 2021 to 33.7% by 2031, representing more than 35 billion chips containing one or more RISC-V cores. Our goal is to help turn those projections into reality.
We are growing the ecosystem at every level, from IP vendors and semiconductor companies to device manufacturers and developers. One of the biggest advantages of RISC-V is that the same ISA can scale from tiny embedded controllers all the way to high-performance computing and AI accelerators. We are also investing heavily in developer education and software support through free courses, workshops, hackathons, and collaborations with organizations such as the Linux Foundation. Ubuntu now officially supports RISC-V, Red Hat has released a developer preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for RISC-V, and NVIDIA has announced plans to port CUDA to the RISC-V RVA23 specification. Developers and the software ecosystem are absolutely central to our long-term growth strategy.
Have government regulations or geopolitical considerations become bottlenecks for establishing RISC-V as a global industry standard?
Not at all. From the beginning, RISC-V has focused on being an open standard rather than a single proprietary implementation. Companies and organizations around the world can invest locally in implementations while collaborating globally at the standards level.
We are very careful to comply with regulations across all jurisdictions and geographies. In fact, last year RISC-V was formally recognized by ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 as a specification submitter, which further reinforces our role as a globally recognized standards organization.
