Semiconductor Insiders - Podcast EP273: An Overview of the RISC-V Market and CAST’s unique Abilities to Grow the Market with Evan Price

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

Dan is joined by Evan Price, Product Manager for embedded processors at CAST. Evan has had a diverse and successful 15-year career developing, then leading as project manager and director, with a variety of semiconductor-based products. Evan joined CAST in 2024 and provides technical support as well as handling product marketing… Read More

Hello, my name is Daniel Nenny, founder of SemiWiki, the open forum for semiconductor professionals. Welcome to the Semiconductor Insiders podcast series. My guest today is Evan Price, product manager for embedded processors at CAST. Evan has had a diverse and successful 15-year career, developing then leading as project manager and director with a variety of semiconductor-based products. Evan joined CAST in 2024 and provides technical support as well as handling product marketing and strategy for the company's embedded processor line. Welcome to the podcast, Evan. Good to be here. I'm happy to be here.

Yeah, we last talked at the RISC-V Summit last December, I believe, right? That's right. You came by our booth and we were happy to show our RISC-V offerings over there at the summit. Yeah, so I want to follow up with you on that. But first, I would like to ask you a more personal question. What brought you to semiconductors? I guess I didn't really know what to do with my life, but I'd always been in athletics and I'd always been interested in multiple different hobbies. But I don't know if you remember in middle school where they give you a test to tell you what you would most likely succeed at or be good later in life. And I just remember very vividly that the one thing that they told me I probably should avoid and probably wouldn't be good at was electrical engineering. So I kind of took that as a personal challenge. I decided that,

okay, well, if they don't think I'm going to be good at that, I will show them. And so I kind of dedicated myself during high school and college to becoming an electrical engineer. And so now here I am and feel like a pretty successful career up to this point in consumer and power products and now the semiconductor industry. That's a funny story. I had a similar story. When I took that test in middle school, it said I should be a trained brake man. Trained brake man, wonderful. Yeah, I found out because I said I like to work outside.

So that's not something you should say, I guess, if you want to be an engineer. So that's right. Let's talk about RISC-V. Where do you feel the RISC-V market is today and how do you see it evolving? That's a really great question. I mean, I think RISC-V in the market today is a great example of the free market at work. We see so many different articles in the news being published on the potential of RISC-V. And we have seen some big players such as NVIDIA, Google, or many others who've actually

implemented RISC-V into their products. And so when people see that, they're like, oh man, RISC-V is for real. It's here. This is happening. And it's time to go. It's time to run with it. But I think it's really important for people to really see how RISC-V is being used in the market. For instance, NVIDIA, obviously, they're not using it as their main GPU. It's not their high-performance computing piece of the puzzle. They're more using it for security or boot operations or system management. I like to use an analogy of a bricklayer because that's something that I'm close to. My dad was a bricklayer all growing up. Speaking of working outside that you're talking about,

that's something that I did from the time I was 12 until 18. It's interesting because as you work for a bricklayer, you see what they're doing. You're what they call a hod carrier. You supply the bricklayer with everything they need from mud to scaffolding. And you're watching the bricklayer at work putting brick on the wall or block on the wall. And you immediately say to yourself, I can do that. That looks so easy.

And the bricklayer will always wryly smile at you and you his trowel. And then you will say, okay, give it a shot. He'll say, give it a shot. And you try it and it's impossible. You just don't have the training. You don't know how it works. I would say RISC-V is actually really similar. What we see is a lot of people seeing that RISC-V is being used in a lot of these high performance computing applications, but not as the main processor themselves. And so now, with the advent of the vector extension, which was ratified in 2021, we see a lot of people entering into that AI and high-performance computing space. Yeah, I agree. I check design starts and I track them.

And RISC-V is in a huge amount of design starts. There are supporting roles, like you mentioned. But I think pretty soon they'll be the stars. You know, that's just what I have been seeing in the ecosystem. So what do you see as the key advantages and disadvantages of using RISC-V processors today for embedded applications? So I think the key advantage that RISC-V has had from the very beginning is its open source nature. Essentially, it's not ARM, right? I mean, everybody is trying so hard to avoid the royalties from ARM and from other proprietary instruction sets that RISC-V came as a breath of fresh air. And as you say, I think it really

will be the next star even in these high performance computing. But right now, we haven't seen a realization of that yet. And everybody's chasing that at the high end. But ultimately, what RISC-V will provide in the market is a common tool ecosystem for developers across multiple areas. Even now, we see RISC-V being implemented, especially in the automotive space, where the automotive industry is so good about performance standards because of the risks that it can provide for their customers. And so all of those standards have to be so well documented. They need to go through the certification process to ensure that there's a functional safety to the products that are coming into the market. solution, but many companies to actually work together to provide multiple tool chains that are more simplified and also to provide multiple sets of hardware that can compete in the functional safety space. I mean, automotive especially is a huge push that you see in the RISC-V market today.

Right. So what about customizable applications? So what advantages does RISC-V bring to the table for customizable different verticals? This is the promise of RISC-V. This is something where, OK, we have this ratified set of instructions that you can use by RISC-V International. And we continually see new extensions that are being added to it. But beyond that, if somebody needs other functionality within their instruction set, they can go in and they can add to their application. And so that's the main set of customizations that people talk about. But really at Cast, what we are doing, we're really looking more at where RISC-V is at in the market today and what it is being used for right now. And the reason I mentioned that is because what CAST is really good at, what we're really good at is we don't necessarily chase people who are looking to add new instructions to that RISC-V. The kind of customization that we want to help people out with is being able to customize their system, their entire subsystem

around the main embedded processor that they use. And so the type of customization that we are very conversant with is being able to wrap up multiple peripherals with a solid industry proven fabric. And we're able to deliver that to our customers with reliability because it's been tested, it's been proven in the market. You know, CAS has been around a long time, I think over 30 years. How does CAS experience position it uniquely in the embedded processor market? In terms of customizable applications, I mean, generally in the market when we talk about that, we're referring to customizable instruction sets, which is a huge promise that RISC-V provides.

Now, what we value is the ability to customize somebody's subsystem to ensure that they get the extensions that they need for their applications. So we have a broad portfolio and a huge library of different IPs that if you need a complete subsystem with your processor, that's something that we can provide. I mean, we've been in the processor market since the 8051. And so working with our customers to make sure that they pick the right processor for their application is something that we excel in. I mean, what most people refer to as

embedded applications, we actually say deeply embedded applications, and that's what we specialize in. Meaning that if you have a chip that you're accessing code from an embedded ROM, and then your chip runs off of on-chip memory, or if your system runs on on-chip memory, we have incredible RISC-V solutions for applications. Interesting. So can you share examples of some customers navigating RISC-V adoption and some of the challenges that they face? Absolutely. There is, I guess you could say in the market, what we've seen with our customers, a real antelope at the alligator pond approach. Everybody's kind of still a little hesitant on the RISC-V, but they're interested. They're being driven by a lot of their marketing departments because of the hype around RISC-V.

And so we see a lot of developers coming to us almost expecting to get bitten by it. But we've seen a lot of customers eagerly embrace RISC-V. I mean, jump in wholeheartedly. They've seen a lot of success with that. One customer that we have, whom I can't mention, is they've spent years actually evaluating different RISC-V solutions for what they are doing. And ultimately, they decided that, well, we're just going to go back to what we're used to. We don't necessarily want to learn new things. We don't want to learn about these new tools. And our development is going to be faster if we use something that we're already

conversant with. Whereas we have other customers who sometimes don't choose RISC-V at all. They just avoid the entire ecosystem, whether it be because of the newness of the automotive certifications or whether it be because the engineers don't know the tools. We see a few customers in that, but overall, many of our customers have had a lot of success with the RISC-V architecture. Last question, Evan. What role does CAST see for RISC-V in the broader processor market? As I mentioned before, I mean, right now, CAST, we're not targeting the large, and we never have targeted the high performance side of the market. We are really looking towards the embedded and deeply embedded spaces. The reason we do that is because that's where we've had success in the last 30 years. We have robustly verified IP. And it's crazy. When you look at RISC-V,

the projections right now are that the IP, just the intellectual property space of RISC-V is going to expand to about $1.6 billion by the year 2030. And some of that is in the embedded and deeply embedded space where we're already seeing those realizations. And so what we're really focused on is making sure that we provide those robustly verified cores, making sure that we have interoperability tests with them, making sure that we work with the various compilers

out there and making sure that it's an easy ecosystem integration with customers' already known tools. Other than that, something that Cast has been known for for years is our customer support. We want to make sure our customers get the support that they need and within a timely manner. And so anytime somebody decides to use a RISC-V from CAS, they can be sure that they'll be able to be supported in their integration with their system. Assignment times are generally under 24 hours, meaning that if there's a ticket risen from our customers, we'll make sure it gets to the right person within that time frame. And our responses are less than 36 hours. That's the goals. Those are the goals that we have.

But ultimately, we have those assigned out within three hours. And generally, our response times are even better within 12 hours to get a response out to the customer with a potential solution. And that's where we're good. We make sure we give the customers the support that they need. And we've been doing that for 30 years, starting with our 8051. Just a quick follow-on question, Evan. How do customers normally engage with you? Well, really great question. So, I mean, we receive leads from multiple places. SemiWiki is one of those places that we do receive.

So, if you have questions about Cast, you can inquire over SemiWiki or you can go directly to our website on castinc.com and you can fill that out or you can directly email us. I mean, if you go to sales at castinc.com, that's probably the best way to get ahold of us and we'll make sure that we get somebody on the other side who can answer your questions.

And it's really a great experience. We'll make sure that we get somebody on the other side who can answer your questions. And it's really a great experience. We'll make sure that we understand your application to a point where we get the right solution at the right time. Great. And of course, we see you at all the conferences. You're very active in the ecosystem. I'm sure you have another conference coming up. I believe we do. I don't know which one right now. That's a good question. We will be at Embedded World. I do know that.

Of course, that's one of the biggest ones. And hey, I look forward to seeing you again. And, you know, let's have another chat towards the end of the year and catch up. Thank you so much for your time. That concludes our podcast. Thank you all for listening and have a great day.