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Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

allaboutcircuits.com

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Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#51

Post by worldofmatthew »

justahuman74 wrote: post #26
worldofmatthew wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fees dollars saved from not paying ARM will guarantee adoption in low end laptops, tablets and smartphones. $100 Laptops, $70 phones and $50 tablets will be a big target for RISC-V.

ARM could just start price-matching the various RISC-V vendors, making themselves the easier choice due to the software ecosystem

They would have to offer the core for free to the SOC designers.

Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#53

Post by tverbeure »

mysterydip wrote: post #43
cptskippy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really slap an AT motherboard in an LED light bulb and call it a day. Fabs produce all manner of chips, not just GPUs and CPUs. Over the last 40 years all manner of circuits composed of discrete components have been replaced with chips. Voltage regulation is a chip, battery protection is a chip, rectification is a chip.

Good point. What about repurposing FPGAs?

For many FPGAs, the cost of the additional power supply controllers will be more than the cost of a full microcontroller solution.

Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#54

Post by crote »

sremani wrote: post #28
xadhominemx wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High purity quartz is definitely not a bottleneck in the electronics industry.

May be you are right, but can you add some color and context to your commentary. Like a good article link etc. I am more than happy to chance my mind, if provided evidence.

According to your linked article its main use is silicon crucibles - which are required to make the source material for ICs and solar panels.

But solar panel prices continue to drop rapidly, and quite a few silicon-based semiconductors are still widely available at low prices.

The chip shortage is a direct result of a covid-induced demand shift. Manufacturers of cars and consumer electronics seriously mispredicted consumer demand. The resulting mass-cancellation followed by mass-ordering resulted in a demand shockwave for mature microcontrollers, which manufacturers were unable to absorb with existing stock. Due to plant shutdowns and the general multi-month production time, immediate replenishment is not possible. The resulting shortages in turn made downstream manufacturers switch from JIT to hoarding, which made the problem even worse. Microcontroller manufacturers in turn aren't able to adjust supply because fabs are really difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to build.

Nothing about this has anything to do with quartz.

Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#55

Post by cptskippy »

mysterydip wrote: post #43
cptskippy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really slap an AT motherboard in an LED light bulb and call it a day. Fabs produce all manner of chips, not just GPUs and CPUs. Over the last 40 years all manner of circuits composed of discrete components have been replaced with chips. Voltage regulation is a chip, battery protection is a chip, rectification is a chip.

Good point. What about repurposing FPGAs?

Not all Chips are digital logic. In fact most are not. An FPGA is reprogrammable logic. You can not replace a rectifier or regulator with an FPGA.

That's kind of like suggesting someone use a stapler (not a staple) when they need a lag bolt because "well they're both steel".

Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#56

Post by crote »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #33
sremani wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May be you are right, but can you add some color and context to your commentary. Like a good article link etc. I am more than happy to chance my mind, if provided evidence.

Considering that quartz has a ton of limitations, MEMS and other digital oscillators are ready to step in the moment that quartz is cost prohibitive. We're already at a breaking point for low frequency quartz. You literally can't get it small enough for modern packages until you up the frequency. Find a 2x2mm 8Mhz part, I'll wait while you fail. We're JUST NOW starting to get standardization on SMD oscillators in com…

Best I can do right now is TXC AV08000301, which is 3.2x2.5mm.

I'm surprised you even need one like that. Most modern electronics to use clock dividers or multipliers anyways, especially once your chip is small enough that you need a 2x2mm xtal. Or they just have an internal low-accuracy oscillator. In my experience one of the plentiful 4-pin 2520 or 3225 ones usually does the job, and the market has done a decent job standardizing their footprint.

Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#57

Post by oneplane »

throwaway4good wrote: post #42
oneplane wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that matters considering China stole a complete copy of ARM (the company) and has already released new IP under their rebranded name.

Arm China majority shareholders announce the company’s corporate governance issue has been resolved https://www.arm.com/company/news/2022/04/arm-china-majority-...

Unless they actually get the company seal and remove the armed guards and gain control of the building, it's all just PR. On top of that, even then there is nothing to prevent this from happening again, and anything that already has been copied or 'exported' really isn't going back into the box of company secrets.

Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#58

Post by kyaghmour »

There's so much more to a chip than its ISA. I'm not sure how the ISA changes anything. If I design a board around an STM32, for instance, even within that family I'd have to find a chip that has the same exact footprint to be able to replace one that I couldn't find. And even then, I'd like have to reconfigure the software ...

So unless there was a pin-for-pin/electrical standard for chips, the ISA is of no effect.

Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#59

Post by oneplane »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #40
oneplane wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that matters considering China stole a complete copy of ARM (the company) and has already released new IP under their rebranded name.

The stolen architectures cannot be legitimately sold outside of China, due to patents held by ARM ltd. RISC-V avoids these headaches.

Indeed, but conversely, China will have access to ARM no matter what. This also means that we can sanction all we want, they locally have the fabs and IP to create ARM, RISC-V, MIPS and even x86 CPUs (and they are already doing all of that). Granted, their fabs can't do top-of-the-line lithography (yet?) but since they have already created 64-core ARM server CPUs and some custom AI silicon they can get horizontally scaled performance regardless. This is of course their focus: make sure they can make computers and related equipment domestically no matter what.

Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#60

Post by galangalalgol »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #40
oneplane wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that matters considering China stole a complete copy of ARM (the company) and has already released new IP under their rebranded name.

The stolen architectures cannot be legitimately sold outside of China, due to patents held by ARM ltd. RISC-V avoids these headaches.

Aren't the countries that would care about the legalities and patents the same countries that would be sanctioning them? I don't know who will adopt risc-v for high performance. Nvidia maybe? Intel-lattice-altera-intelgpu. Amd-ati-xilinx. Nvidia wanted to be nvidia-arm but as that didn't work, maybe risc-v? No big fpga players for them to pick up though.
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