This is a lot like what the US did in the 1970s and early 1980s. DARPA and other organizations funded VLSI (as they called it then), design tools and a variety of processor architectures. That technology and the community those efforts built have kept us ahead for over fifty years, but it is time to renew the push.
I can see RISC-V being a major piece of future technology, but the dream of the 1970s was a nearly seamless idea to design to layout to chip process, one as simple as writing a basic program. That original effort made software development that simple, but hardware has been a tougher nut to crack. If nothing else, fabricators are and will remain relatively expensive. The closest existing technology involves FPGAs which are inherently parallel. It would be nice if RISC-V or something like it could provide the speed, simplicity and power of FPGAs to serial execution.
I wouldn't worry all that much about China. They have a 20th century model and a strong desire for social control. The Forty Thieves era in Shenzen is in the past and unlikely to return.
Labs Over Fabs: The Geopolitics of RISC-V
Loved this, nice work!
Good stuff, thanks guys!
Thanks for this, super informative.
This is a lot like what the US did in the 1970s and early 1980s. DARPA and other organizations funded VLSI (as they called it then), design tools and a variety of processor architectures. That technology and the community those efforts built have kept us ahead for over fifty years, but it is time to renew the push.
I can see RISC-V being a major piece of future technology, but the dream of the 1970s was a nearly seamless idea to design to layout to chip process, one as simple as writing a basic program. That original effort made software development that simple, but hardware has been a tougher nut to crack. If nothing else, fabricators are and will remain relatively expensive. The closest existing technology involves FPGAs which are inherently parallel. It would be nice if RISC-V or something like it could provide the speed, simplicity and power of FPGAs to serial execution.
I wouldn't worry all that much about China. They have a 20th century model and a strong desire for social control. The Forty Thieves era in Shenzen is in the past and unlikely to return.