The open-source RISC-V instruction set continues to make inroads across the electronics industry. Electronic Design’s and Microwaves & RF’s Bill Wong offer his take on the current status and future of the technology.
A great deal of attention has been directed toward the RISC-V development community and IP ecosystem, with many companies starting to explore and adopt the open-source solution in their products and processes.
Considering it all began in 2010 at the University of California at Berkeley, the RISC-V architecture has taken the industry by storm, with members in over 70 countries. A load-store architecture, RISC-V uses IEEE 754 floating-point instructions with bit field locations that simplify the use of multiplexers in a CPU. A fixed location for the sign bit of immediate values speeds up sign extension.