We are bridge, coach, matchmaker for partners in open innovation: Q&A with RISC-V International CEO Calista Redmond

RISC-V is becoming a mainstream architecture to share the market with Intel’s X86 and Arm. Being an open platform, it is especially attracting extraordinary attention from semiconductor industry participants as well as investors amid rising geopolitical tensions that are putting restrictions on technology innovations. The popularity of RISC-V is reflected in the fact that as soon as news about RISC-V hosting a 2022 RISC-V Taipei Day event on the auspicious occasion of SEMICON Taiwan 2022 went public, the event was fully booked in a day. DIGITIMES hosted an exclusive interview with RISC-V International CEO Calista Redmond, who gave a detailed account of RISC-V and Intel’s collaboration, the outlook for RISC-V’s business development and the roles it aims to play in the semiconductor industry.

Q: RISC-V is flourishing and has attracted the attention of major players such as Intel as well as new entrants to the semiconductor industry. Many people are very eager to know what RISC-V has been doing with your collaboration with Intel and your future outlook.

A: Our roots have been in the RISC architecture, which has been around for decades. So it really gives strong assurance to the market, that we aren’t inventing something new. We’ve taken an established RISC architecture, and we’ve made it open and accessible for everyone. This openness has unleashed so much interest across so many different types of stakeholders.

The stakeholders began in academia because we wanted something where students could take something from the base design all the way through to tape out. From early on, industry stakeholders were also kind of saying, “You know what? We want to control our own destiny.”

Controlling your own destiny means having freedom – having freedom of design as well as collaboration. Who can I work with? What comes into my product? Where do I glean interest from a diversity of supply chains? And then where can I take my product? Where’s the opportunity? How do I capitalize on so much growth in the semiconductor industry across many different areas?

So by lowering the barrier to entry, for the option to command that kind of control, that’s where RISC-V really got started.

And now, today – fast forward seven years – we’re seeing the promise that openness is delivering. Because we continue to have a nice community around academia and research, but the commercial opportunity, and the commercial interest in RISC-V, are absolutely exploding. So we’ve got great momentum that started in embedded, continues to build, and that’s generating volume. With volume comes experience. The foundries are seeing that; the design houses are seeing that; the verification tools are seeing that – all of us are building collective experience, investment, and scale.

Commercial stakeholders now have vested interests in RISC-V too and if you think about just basic investment strategy, whether you’re looking at your retirement fund, or you’re looking at a company and where they have their business interests, diversifying your portfolio, it’s like square one, right? They’re saying: “We’ve been on Intel, we’ve been on ARM, we see control points, and those are very different than the control points in an open approach.”

So it goes both ways. The companies that are investing commercially in RISC-V have multiple avenues for growth. But RISC-V also benefits from multiple stakeholders investing in it. So the future of RISC-V is not pinned to any one company or interest.

We saw that happen in software – the cause and effect of the investments of an entire community that has no single geographic interests, no single corporate interests. That collective investment reduces the risks in choosing RISC-V because it’s strategically durable – it has long-term durability.

I used to do lots of mergers & acquisition activity over at IBM. We tried hard to reduce risks with a diversified portfolio and not overlap or cannibalize our own. So to answer your question about Intel – it’s been really interesting for me to see history rewrite itself. In 2001, IBM had a huge software business, a huge systems business, and a huge services business, and said, “You know, what? We need to work on both ends. We need to do both our own proprietary software, and take an open approach.” And there was a large stakeholder in that software community that was commanding incredible market share: Microsoft. So IBM, you know, put investments in both its own software as well as Linux. They had both in their strategy, so they declared a billion-dollar investment in Linux. And it really took off, and now Linux underpins all the major software that runs in the world: stock markets, airlines, credit cards, financial systems…

That’s what’s happening with RISC-V. And that’s what Intel said, “Hey, we’ve done our own architecture, but RISC-V gives us an opportunity to diversify and build there too because we also have a foundry business. So how do we help fill our fab with as many options as possible?” And they bring in Arm, they bring in RISC-V and everything else. They’ve invested deeply in RISC-V because they appreciate that entire ecosystem of stakeholders that are vital for that long-term durability. And Intel has an interest in mass production, mass volume, and as much as they can to fill those fabs because, you know, that’s not an easy business to be in.

These are important lessons from history that we’re learning and investing in.

So Intel planted its billion-dollar flag earlier this year. And they are doing it in a multifaceted way. They said, “Let’s surround this investment with the support that this community needs.” And we’ve seen others follow suit. If you’ve watched the trajectory, or the growing list of logos of both big and small companies, the selection of geography, size and scope of businesses from startups to huge multinationals… We’ve got Seagate, and by the way, Qualcomm just came in. They’re leveling up. We’ve got Huawei, Alibaba, we’ve got a lot of big heavy hitters that are sort of the market thought leaders. And that sends a signal to the venture capital community: This is real. This is now. So then you have things like Ventana and SiFive and venture capital that are deeply invested strategically.

And that, by the way, is happening around the world. We have Chengwei Capital on our board of directors as a premier member, they have a billion-dollar fund in China alone. This is not just a North America or Europe play. This is truly global. I have been watching those numbers and those statistics are very persuasive.

I’ve been here for three and a half years, and the rate of growth has continued to accelerate and [RISC-V membership] remains a third North America, a third Europe, and a third APAC.

We are seeing another interesting stakeholder: Nations or regions. India’s investments started with the Shakti project and are now growing and developing – not just semiconductors, but their own intellectual property, venture capital, education, and industry. They don’t want to just be a supported country for the rest of the world’s success, they want to drive their own.

We also see that in Europe. Europe is growing rapidly at a surprising speed – they are realizing and appreciating that taking an open approach is going to deeply connect them to the rest of the world. Taking an open approach means you don’t just do it for Europe, but do it in a manner that engages globally so that you have development partners, market opportunity, and supply chain, those are very important ingredients. The European Union is investing millions of dollars in specific grants, for cultivation and development of semiconductors. In Europe, we see it going on within countries, such as Spain and Israel dedicating millions of dollars.

And then, of course, we see it in Asia. There’s a huge contribution and huge investment coming from the China Academy of Sciences, and we’ve got several more premier members. So that’s been a testament to the dedication we see in China to being an open-source citizen and leader. It’s one thing to just be engaged, it’s another thing to step forward and say, I’m going to role model the behavior and the dedication of open source that we are ascribing to our policies and our strategy locally.

Q: You have mentioned very exciting growth in these regions, can we have the ballpark figure of how each of these regions is growing?

A: So far, this year, we are growing at a clip of close to 50%, and that builds off 134% year-over-year growth in 2021. We see very even growth across all three regions. We have more premier members from Asia than we do from other regions. That strategic class of membership is also growing across commercial members. But contributions don’t just come from where you sit in the organization structure. I would rather see market movement – that cores are being produced in the market and going to market. We want people to get hands-on code. Let’s get products out.

Q: And you’ve also mentioned that Chinese investors have been very interested in participating in this platform. And, of course, we noted several important companies such as Alibaba and Huawei have joined your board. But in recent years, it seems that the US and China have been competing around technologies such as chips, AI, etc. And would the political environment have any pressure on you? What is the role that you want to play in the China market?

A: We don’t get involved in politics – we make sure we follow all laws that apply to our organization. Our role really is to build bridges. Our role is to seek collaboration and look past politics to say, “What is the best thing that we can collectively do for the industry, for the future of computing to bring open standards to that future?”

We do not have commercial relationships with any company. We are a member-oriented, nonprofit organization. And we don’t have confidential discussions. We ensure everyone in our community knows: “Don’t bring secrets to our meeting. This is not the place for that. If you want to go have one-on-one relationships with each other on something else, that’s outside of what we provide in our workgroups.” That way, everyone feels welcome to engage.

Everything we do is publicly available to the world. We want to make sure that we’re not breaking a law by doing that.

Those pressures are largely about commercial relationships, but we absolutely work with our members to say we understand that those pressures are affecting your business. So we will not put barriers up to promote one success over another, we would never do that. We do follow every export control law, and every regulation, but also understand that governments around the world support open source and open global standards.

Think about global standards. You can’t put a barrier on who can use Bluetooth, right? It doesn’t make sense because no one country or company owns that. RISC-V works the same way.

Say there are three organizations all working on one piece of the puzzle that would benefit everybody, that it’s not a piece and wants to make money on. Yet it’s a piece on which everyone needs to be in lockstep. RISC-V International becomes the shepherd and is the custodian of that open piece of the puzzle.

We also hope RISC-V helps forge meaningful, deep relationships. Because fundamentally, the mindset doesn’t change if people don’t have a real engagement and relationship. If it is still “them” and “us”, how do we ever come together? We are all here for the same shared purpose – to move this industry forward, to reinvent and rewrite history for computing.

Q: Yes, there should be more collaborations instead of trying to compete against each other in a zero-sum way.

A: Let’s remember, there is healthy competition, too. Take the pieces of the puzzle and combine them how you wish. In a market of fair access, may the best solutions win. There’s so much market opportunity. There are so many places to go with custom processing that didn’t exist before. There’s so much room for everyone to win.

Q: The 2022 industry tracks announced by RISC-V Global Summit in August, reflect the agility of your community. So tell us what are the goals of progress that you would like to see in those verticals?

A: The goal of a summit is to showcase specific solutions, and specific challenges and how we overcome them, and to get differentiation on RISC-V relative to us. The industry tracks in the summit are a reflection of the industries we see having the deepest investment and adoption and momentum in the market and inside of our community. We just had our great China summit for RISC-V. And hopefully next year, we’ll host RISC-V Global Summits in China, Europe, and North America.

In June, I gave a talk at an automotive electronics conference in Germany. And we also had a presence at Embedded World. And you could really see things turning from interest into investment. When it crosses that transom, it’s interesting to see whether that investment is an existing rip and replace or a new capability that an organization never had before. So we see RISC-V being used for existing challenges and new opportunities.

We’ve seen the transformation where we’ve really gone from an idea into implementation, where you truly can understand that we’re no longer segmented into embedded, but we have traction across the entire compute spectrum. And we’ve made that leap faster than any other architecture. In fact, some have never quite made it all the way.

You look at things like vector processing – we want to showcase where does that apply in automotive? Where does that apply in AI and machine learning? How do you ascribe different capabilities that you can only get with RISC-V because of that open design and freedom? How do you showcase that data center where you have, some kind of inputs of the network of the servers of the edge processing? How do you bring that together? We want to show novel combinations and innovations that have come from partnerships and collaborations in the community as well as independent entities. It could be your research in high-performance computing, it could be in the commercial sector. We want to showcase real-world applications of these technologies that are now on the market or being launched at Summit.

There have been 50 different architectures since the 1980s. (But until 2020, there were really only two commercial architectures that captured significant market opportunity: Arm and Intel.

And now you start to see a RISC-V opportunity, and it’s because of design freedom. A lot of times you actually get a better product, combining things together with incredible intellectual property that you see in the community, whether it’s Andes, StarFive, or even Intel. And then you surround that with commercial-grade toolings like Lauterbach or any of the other toolsets. And you start to understand that you can actually have a better chance – you have a much more competitive take in existing industries, as well as in terms of the new green-field opportunities.

Q: I see. Can you share with us what is the most important mission for RISC-V during this moment that people see as the golden era for semiconductors? And what is your vision for the role that RISC-V plays in that?

A: I think that our role is part coach and part matchmaker.

As a coach, we make sure all of this works in harmony. As a matchmaker, we make sure we produce things. Today, we have more than 66 different workgroups on different pieces of that puzzle.

We understand how many different participants in the industry are working on the same thing. That’s an opportunity to say, “Hey, companies, let’s go put this in an open workgroup together so that we can all get past it quickly.” And you can go put your incredible differentiation on top of that and go to market and be successful, rather than everybody working on this same part. That’s how we avoid fragmentation – we avoid locking in that temptation. Because sometimes, companies in their haste to get to market, see a piece of the puzzle and say, “If I develop that, I’ll get there first and make more money.” But that only gets you to six months, or one quarter or one year of advantage. If we do that piece together, they have the next 10 years that they can go be a leader in this other differentiation. So that’s our coach role. Our matchmaker role is to say, “Hey specific companies, come together and work on this piece together.”

And then beyond what we produce, we are here to amplify and demonstrate all of the incredible momentum going on in the industry.

RISC-V has the potential to become the base building foundation across the entire spectrum of computing. RISC-V really is the right platform and the best option across the industry. It is brilliant architecture with many fantastic people. And when you get their passionate excitement to come together and work shoulder to shoulder with folks that are tackling similar challenges – that’s something we can do in real time – we see the best minds across the industry coming together. And that’s what’s powerful. That’s what makes me so excited about RISC-V.

Bio

Calista Redmond is the CEO of RISC-V International with a mission to expand and engage RISC-V stakeholders, compel industry adoption, and increase visibility and opportunity for RISC-V within and beyond RISC-V International. Prior to RISC-V International, Redmond held a variety of roles at IBM, including vice president of IBM Z Ecosystem where she led strategic relationships across software vendors, system integrators, business partners, developer communities, and broader engagement across the industry.