What’s at stake:
The world’s biggest automotive chip suppliers – Robert Bosch, Infineon Technologies, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP Semiconductors, and Qualcomm – have banded together to “invest in a company aimed at advancing the adoption of RISC-V globally by enabling next-generation hardware development.” Why now and what does it mean for the future of Arm.
RISC-V scored a major coup with the announcement that some of the electronics industry’s biggest suppliers of automotive semiconductors have teamed up to set up a joint venture focused on the open standard instruction set architecture.
Infineon Technologies AG, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP Semiconductors, Robert Bosch and Qualcomm said the the JV, based in Germany, would be equally shared among them as a “single source to enable compatible RISC-V based products, provide reference architectures, and help establish industry standards,” according to the group’s spokesperson.
The company will focus initially on automotive applications while apparently leaving room for further expansion into other product areas, including mobile and IoT. Nonetheless, the announcement’s seismic impact will likely affect, first and foremost, automakers and tier ones.