RISC-V is growing rapidly. Semico Research has projected that 62.4 billion RISC-V CPU cores will be sold in 2025. While that’s only about 6% of the overall CPU core market, RISC-V is an emerging technology that most designers should follow and become increasingly familiar with. RISC-V is becoming more commercially attractive as a result of recent developments in design and validation tools (that will be the focus of the second FAQ in this series). The emergence of RISC-V based devices optimized for specific applications such as the IoT and wearables, embedded systems, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) (to be discussed in FAQs 3 and 4).