RISCIC completes tens of millions of dollars in A+ round of financing, and RISC-V chips are about to enter the high-end

RISCIC completes tens of millions of dollars in A+ round of financing, and RISC-V chips are about to enter the high-end

Recently, RISC-V company RISCIC completed tens of millions of dollars in A+ round of financing. The lead investors in this round of financing are Bytedance and Hillhouse Ventures, and the following investors include Lenovo Ventures, Shuanghu Capital, Shuimu Investment Group, Zhen Fund, etc., Northern Light Ventures, Baidu Ventures and other old shareholders continue to follow Yibai Capital acted as the exclusive financial adviser.

Founded in Shenzhen in 2018, RISCIC mainly develops high-end processors and DSP/AI chips based on the RISC-V instruction set, which can be used in high-end audio and video, machine vision, automotive, communications and other scenarios.

It is reported that RISCIC is currently the only RISC-V manufacturer in China that cooperates with major international manufacturers in the field of core high-performance processors/DSP. The company said that this round of financing will be used for independent and controllable high-end CPU research and development. It has reached cooperation with many international chip giants and has become a core supplier of mainstream products for major customers.

Tan Zhangxi, the founder of RISCIC, said that this round of funds will be used to further expand the talent pool and carry out the research and development and implementation of mid-to-high-end line RISC-V chip products. From the perspective of the team background, Tan Zhangxi inherited the RISC-V founder Professor David Patterson. He is a member of the RISC-V original project team. He previously founded the lidar chip company OURS, which was acquired by the American autonomous driving company Aurora for US$100 million in early 2021.

At the same time, the proportion of R&D personnel in R&D is over 85%, and the core R&D team has chip development experience in well-known semiconductor companies.

RISC-V is the fifth generation streamlined instruction set. It is an open source chip architecture. It is regarded as a three-part CPU world with x86 and Arm. It breaks the conventions of high licensing fees and difficult customization. It is streamlined, open source, and responsive. Fast and other features can be used to develop unique chips that are more suitable for specific products and needs. At the same time, due to the open source and neutral characteristics of RISC-V, many countries have seen it as an opportunity for overtaking in the chip field, so RISC-V chips have attracted global attention.

In the past, the industry's expectations for RISC-V were mainly concentrated in the field of low-end chips. In recent years, as the RISC-V community has made breakthroughs in many aspects of software and hardware, such as increased computing power, software, compilers and other ecosystems have gradually matured, RISC-V-based processors can support more complex and higher-performance software and hardware products , Is constantly promoting the development of RISC-V to high-end chips such as servers and PCs.

This year, Intel was revealed to have proposed to acquire the star RISC-V startup SiFive at a transaction price of more than 2 billion US dollars. Apple has also started posting RISC-V high-performance engineer recruitment positions on its official website.

According to Semico Research's forecast, by 2025, CPU shipments based on the RISC-V architecture will exceed 60 billion. In the server field, the ARK Big Ideas series annual report predicts that the server market share occupied by the Arm + RISC-V combination will increase from zero in 2020 to 71% in 2030; at the same time, Arm and RISC-V may Will replace Intel x86 in the "cloud" business area. By 2030, their combined market size will grow at a rate of 45% per year, with CPU revenue reaching 19 billion U.S. dollars and server revenue reaching 100 billion U.S. dollars.
Through the free innovation of the architecture, the RISC-V-based design chip can combine the algorithm and application requirements of the subset at the chip level, and customize the optimal command for the exclusive scene, achieve the effect of low energy consumption and high performance for the specific scene, and has the incomparable Arm. Advantages will become the mainstream architecture for many high-end vertical scenes. "Tan Zhangxi said.

RISCIC has developed high-end scalar and vector processor cores based on the RISC-V architecture. At the same time, it has completed commercial implementation through various methods such as independent development of chip products, cooperative development and provision of technical services.