Semico: The number of RISC-V chips will reach 62.4 billion by 2025.

Recently, market research firm Semico Research initiated a study to quantify the total available market (TAM) for CPU IP cores and estimate the service available market (SAM) for RISC-V IP cores.

The study results show that by 2025, the number of chips using the RISC-V architecture is expected to increase to 62.4 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 146% from 2018 to 2025. These chips will be mainly used in the industrial market, PCs, consumer electronics, and communication markets, etc.

Semico Research, in collaboration with the RISC-V Foundation, identified 34 sub-markets and studied the TAM and SAM of each market, ultimately making predictions for the data in 2025. The report highlights four semiconductor devices with high-value opportunities for using RISC-V cores:

• High-performance multi-core SoC
• Value multi-core SoC
• Basic SoC
• Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)

Semico Research stated that interest in RISC-V products is growing in all major end applications, and significant ongoing development is taking place. In addition, RISC-V devices have a wide range of high-performance capabilities, and RISC-V's flexible open-source strategy provides a competitive advantage, which will change the landscape of the CPU IP market.

RISC-V originated in the United States and is an open-source chip architecture. However, not long ago, the RISC-V Foundation took the initiative to move its headquarters to Switzerland to avoid potential U.S. export bans on China.

It is understood that in the field of chip architecture, ARM's IP holds an absolute monopoly, while the x86 architecture monopolizes the sub-segment of the PC chip market. MIPS, Alpha, SPARC, Itanium, and PA-RISC each occupy a small part of the market. However, the lack of competition has led to increasingly expensive ARM IP licensing, which has been publicly criticized by some companies. ARM's staunch supporters, such as Huawei, Qualcomm, Google, etc., have joined the open-source architecture RISC-V camp to diversify risks, and currently, hundreds of well-known technology companies worldwide have joined.