SemiWiki.com - Podcast EP282: An Overview of Andes Focus on RISC-V and the Upcoming RISC-V CON

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

Dan is joined by Marc Evans, director of business development and technology at Andes. Marc has over twenty years of experience in the use of CPU, DSP, and Specialized IP in SoCs from his prior positions at Lattice Semiconductor, Ceva, and Tensilica. During his early career, Marc was a processor architect, making significant contributions… 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 Mark Evans. He has over 20 years of experience in the use of CPU, DSP and specialized IP in SOCs from his prior positions at Lattice Semiconductor, SEVA, and Tensilica. During his early career, Mark was a processor architect making significant contributions to multiple microprocessors and systems at Tensilica, HP, Rambus, RISE Technologies, and Amdahl. Welcome to the podcast, Mark. Thank you, Daniel. It's great to be here.

So let's start by getting a little bit of background. How did you get your start in semiconductors? Actually, it's kind of funny. I think everybody has a moment in their life that sort of shapes them. And mine actually goes back to middle school where I was selected for a pilot program in computer programming. And that really took a hold of actually goes back to middle school where I was selected for a pilot program in computer programming and that really took a hold of me and then when I got my first computer which I remember being an Apple 2C the first thing I did was take

it apart to try to see what made it work. So fast forward a bit I went on to Rensselaer and my first job out of school was at Amdahl doing microprocessor design and I've been in the microprocessor domain ever since. I'd say the other area of my career that was really transformative was in Tensilica where I shifted more from the design aspect to the commercialization aspect and working with customers. That's a great story. My first computer was the Commodore PET, so that ages me a little bit. That's how I got started too. What brought you to Andes?

Yeah. Andes, I was doing quite a bit. Risk 5 I found very exciting. I was doing research on a number of different Risk 5 providers when I was doing quite a risk five I found very exciting and I was doing research on a number of different risk five providers when I was searching for my next career move. And Andy's had a really unique combination that I liked. First of all, the company was commercially focused

and a couple of years ago, risk five still felt a little academic to me, but Andy's had the right commercial balance. I did actually talk to a number of Andy's customers and all of them had very positive feedback. And I like working in small tight-knit teams and you know, Andy's USA is not very old and has a smaller team.

So I get to do a little bit of you bit of everything, whatever it takes to get done. And the US has now 30% of the revenue for Andes. So it's a very strategic segment and important to the company. So that combination was great for me. So what else can you tell me about Andes? I noticed that you have a new logo. What's the story behind that? Yeah, so I'll go back a little bit in history.

Andes is a leader in RISC-V. The company was founded in 2005 with the initial target of developing a CPU architecture in Taiwan. So the company was founded in Shenzhou. In 2011, Andes actually patented their own ISA called the Andes Star V3. But Dr. Hsu, the president and CTO,

and Frank-Wall-Lynn, the CEO, they were quite visionary. And when Risk 5 came around, Andes immediately jumped in full force, became a founding member of Risk5 International and founded the US subsidiary of Andes. Later the company went on to IPO and the Taiwan Stock Exchange and were the first guys to release things

like a DSP Risk5 processor and Risk5 vector processors. So fast forward to today and the company has 30% of the total RISC-V IP market, north of 500 employees and a lot of licensees. Recently, actually last month, Andy celebrated the 20th birthday of the company's founding and we've been in RIS in Risk 5 ever since the beginning. Risk 5 actually is celebrating its 15th year birthday.

And the new logo brings, first a more modern look and feel to it, but it really leans into Andy's commitment to Risk 5. The new logo adopts the Risk 5 blue and gold coloring. And you'll notice the S in the Andes is stylized like a five to also emphasize our commitment to RISC-V. That's great. We've been working with Andes since the beginning of Semmowiki and it's been a very interesting experience and a great collaboration. So let's talk about RISC-V Con. Why hold your own conference? That's a great question. We hold these conferences worldwide and we've been doing it for a number of

years. As the leading IP provider and a founding member of RISC-V International, we do it for a few reasons. First, it's our commitment to Risk5 to give Risk5 more exposure. We try to hold them roughly opposite in the year of Risk5's international show, the Risk5 Summit, and that allows, you know, Risk5 to get sort of a double bang exposure throughout the year in the different regions. Second, you know, it allows us to gather the ecosystem, customers, prospects, and anybody that just wants to know a little bit more about RISC-V in a fun and informative event. The other thing, and I think this is important, is that we focus, I think, a little bit more

on the commercialization aspects of RISC- 5. So we have a lot of partners talking about how the integrations work and customers talking about how they use Risk 5. I noticed you have two tracks. Who's your target audience? It's a great question, Daniel. Really, we're trying to put a show together that has something to appeal to everyone from hands-on engineers to executives of companies and certainly for project managers and product managers, everything in between. The two tracks really try to cover that. We have a main session, which we have done every year, And the main session is really focused

at I'd say a product and up level. It consists of market updates. We have customers talk about what they do with Risk5 and what their end products are. We also have a number of our partners talking about how they integrate with the Risk5 ecosystem. And then we'll have quite a few thought leaders in their fields that are talking about everything

from security and encryption and 5G processing all the way through a lot of information on AI. Our developer track is new this year, and that's gonna be a limited seating event. It runs at the same time in parallel. And in the developer track, we're doing some one plus hour hands-on deep dive sessions. There's actually four of them. Two of the sessions will be conducted by Andes, and that will be how to optimize your code using RISC-V vectors. The other

will be on adding custom instructions to RISC-V. That's a key value of RISC-V, and you'll learn how to add custom instructions on that. One of the sessions is sponsored by one of our partners, IAR Systems. They'll be showing how their professional and automotive grade tools work with RISC-V. And another session is sponsored by our partners Imagination Technologies and Bias Systems.

And they are going to teach on heterogeneous compute and performance, how to use GPU and CPU traces to optimize heterogeneous compute systems. Now, interesting. I know quite a few of your speakers. It really is an all-star cast of processor, AI, and security professionals. Yeah, so we're going to have a number of different speakers this year. Obviously, we'll be talking about processors and the ecosystem around processors.

We also have a couple of our customers coming to talk. One I'm really excited to hear from is from Kornami, who is doing fully homomorphic encryption, which is some mind bending mathematics that allow end to end encryption. We also have EdgeQ going to talk about how they do 5G communications base station on a chip. And we'll have this really great fireside chat for Edge AI of Tomorrow featuring

Jeff Beer, the founder of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and Pete Warden, one of the initial members for TensorFlow Lite Micro at Google, and now the CEO of Useful Sensors. Yeah, you know, Kornami, I actually know Kornami quite well. That's founded by Gordy Campbell and Wally Rines is the CEO. They're doing some amazing things. This really is an all-star cast. So, when and where is the conference? Just for the audience. The conference will be held at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose. It's on April 29th.

Registration starts at 9. All the sessions will start by 9.30. Promptly, we'll have breakfast at 9. It'll run until 5, and then we'll have a nice evening reception. There'll be plenty of networking opportunities throughout the day. Yeah, it's one of my favorite locations. And so just to be clear, there is breakfast, lunch, and a networking reception, and there is no cost to the attendee, correct? Absolutely. Ah, life's kind of conference. Great, Mark. Thanks again for your time, and I'll see you there.

Thank you, Daniel. your time and I'll see you there. Thank you, Daniel. That concludes our podcast. Thank you all for listening and have a great day.