<span style="font-size:16px;"> On March 13, according to the WeChat official account of "China Unicom Pan terminal Technology", China Unicom is actively laying out the RISC-V field, and formally joined the CRVIC alliance in March this year. China Unicom wrote in a press release that, with this successful accession to the alliance, China Unicom will work with key enterprises in the RISC-V field, research institutes, and other industry chain partners to jointly draw a blueprint for the development of China's RISC-V technology and industry, and deepen efforts in the formulation of RISC-V international standards, tackling common technology issues, and establishing intellectual property cooperation mechanisms, providing important support for the localization leadership of Unicom terminals, including RedCap and self research industry terminals. RISC-V is an Open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) based on the principle of Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC), which can be applied to required devices for free. Its birth is believed to be a new round of innovation in the chip market in the future after x86 and ARM architectures. So, why did China Unicom, as one of the three largest telecom operators in China, announce its participation in the CRVIC alliance at this time? What impact will it have on the development of the domestic RISC-V industry? **RISC-V is "raging" in the field of the Internet of Things** In the PC era, the "Wintel" alliance under the x86 private instruction set developed rapidly, with Microsoft's market value once reaching as high as $200 billion; In the era of mobile terminals, the AA alliance under the ARM private instruction set has rapidly risen, with Google's market value reaching an astonishing 1600 billion dollars. This seems to reveal a truth that instruction set architecture, as a key technology between software and hardware, occupies a high value in the IT ecosystem. In the face of the larger era of the Internet of Things, there is probably no enterprise that is not moved by it. Unlike the two architectures mentioned above, the RISC-V Reduced Instruction Set Architecture (RISC-V), which was born in 2010, is regarded as the key to digging gold in the Internet of Things industry due to its open source, simplicity, modularity, and scalability technology advantages. It has even become popular in the industry to say that RISC-V, together with x86 architecture and ARM architecture, will form a "tripartite balance" in the market. The reason seems very simple. RISC-V has two important advantages that the above architecture does not have. On the one hand, it is reflected in open source and openness, and on the other hand, it is reflected in flexibility and customization. First of all, with the rapid development of the Internet of Things industry, a series of related technologies, such as underlying chips, operating systems in the middle layer, and applications in the upper layer, have begun to receive much attention. However, due to changes in external factors such as the international environment, localization, autonomy, and controllability are on the agenda, leading to the urgent need for domestic players to develop technologies that are not subject to monopoly constraints and have supply chain security advantages to promote the development of domestic related industries. The open source architecture of RISC-V has therefore received widespread attention from Chinese enterprises. Secondly, the typical challenges and characteristics of the Internet of Things are fragmentation, personalization, and differentiation, while RISC-V can expand, tailor, modify, and customize instruction sets based on specific application scenarios. RISC-V includes a basic instruction set, an optional instruction set, user instructions, and privileged instructions. The basic instruction set is a must for any company or individual using RISC-V. The optional instruction set gives users choice space, and the user and privileged instruction set can be increased according to the requirements of the application scenario. It is precisely because RISC-V provides an extensible instruction set that provides RISC-V with a very important "elasticity". At the first Dark Iron RISC-V Ecological Conference held by Alibaba Pingtouge earlier this month, David Patterson, the father of RISC-V and winner of the Turing Award, confirmed the potential of RISC-V in the field of the Internet of Things with tangible data. He said, "In the IoT field, it is predicted that by 2025, 28% of the market will be occupied by RISC-V." Obviously, this is absolutely suitable for China Unicom, which has continuously promoted the "big connection" strategy in recent years. In fact, it was also mentioned in the press release of China Unicom that RISC-V has been widely used in the IoT field due to its advantages such as openness and low power consumption. With the continuous improvement of RISC-V capabilities, it will be deeply integrated with 5G technology and gradually applied to 5G IoT products including RedCap, laying a solid foundation for the localization breakthrough of the chip industry. **China is becoming the main battlefield of RISC-V** In addition to the temptation from the huge market of the Internet of Things, the preliminarily formed ecosystem of RISC-V in China should also be an important reason for China Unicom to choose to actively layout RISC-V. The CRVIC Alliance announced by China Unicom this time is fully known as the China RISC-V Industry Consortium, and is a highly influential organization in the domestic RISC-V field. Under the guidance and support of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology, the National Integrated Circuit Innovation Center, and the Shanghai Integrated Circuit Industry Association, the Alliance is a national, non-profit social organization jointly founded by key enterprises, universities, research institutes, investment institutions, and social organizations in the RISC-V field at home and abroad in Shanghai on September 20, 2018. The goal of the CRVIC Alliance is to accelerate the organizational research and development of the domestic RISC-V industry, establish an independent, controllable, and secure RISC-V computing platform made in China, and promote the formation of a RISC-V industry ecological chain that runs through IP cores, chips, software, systems, applications, and other links. The CRIVC alliance's explicit support for RISC-V has also played a significant role in promoting the development of the RISC-V instruction set in China. In November of the same year, the Institute of Computing (ICT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing also established the "China Open Command Ecosystem (RISC-V) Alliance" at the World Internet Conference held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang. Interestingly, ICT is also a member of the CRVIC Alliance. Moreover, the contribution of Chinese players to the RISC-V ecosystem has also spread to the international market. According to data from the RISC-V International Foundation, 13 of the 25 top international members of the RISC-V Foundation come from China. </span></br> <div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">  </div><br> <span style="font-size:16px;"> When these are reflected in the market, data can further prove how important the advantages of China's RISC-V industrial ecology have initially been established. According to RISC-V shipment statistics, as of July 2022, the global shipment volume of RISC-V architecture chips has exceeded 10 billion, of which, the Chinese chip industry has shipped 5 billion RISC-V chips, accounting for half of RISC-V chip shipments. **Three major operators collectively "fall in love" with RISC-V** In fact, in addition to China Unicom, two other domestic telecom operators have already launched a layout in the RISC-V field. As recently as last March, China Mobile's OenOS Internet of Things operating system officially announced its participation in the CRVIC alliance. </span> <div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">  </div><br> <span style="font-size:16px;"> China Mobile said that after joining the CRVIC industry alliance, China Mobile OneOS will leverage the alliance platform and its own channel advantages to promote industrial exchanges and promote the widespread application of RISC-V. At the same time, OneOS will actively participate in the formulation of RISC-V standards and the construction of China's RISC-V technology and industry development blueprint, and collaborate with key enterprises and research institutes in the RISC-V field to carry out common technological breakthroughs and innovation. In terms of action, China Mobile has not lost a bit. At the 2022 China Mobile Global Partner Conference in December of the same year, China Mobile's chip company, Xinsheng Technology Co., Ltd., released two RISC-V core Internet of Things communication chips. Among them, an NB-IoT communication chip CM6620 is the first low-power NB-IoT Internet of Things communication chip based on RISC-V core architecture of China Mobile Core Technology, using a domestic 192 MHz RISC-V core and 40 nm technology. The other CM8610 is a LTE chip based on the RISC-V core architecture. It uses a 22nm process, has good RF performance, minimal BOM, and supports Open CPU, which can be applied in medium and low speed Internet of Things application scenarios. Although it has not yet been checked from official channels whether China Telecom has joined the domestic RISC-V alliance, its actions cannot obscure its determination to embrace RISC-V. At the "2022 Tianyi Digital Technology Ecological Conference", Saifang Technology was invited to attend the conference, and this company is an important player in the domestic RISC-V software and hardware industry chain. In the speech, Saifang Technology stated that it would conduct in-depth cooperation with China Telecom in cloud, edge, and end scenarios based on its self developed high-performance RISC-V CPU IP and SoC chip platform, which undoubtedly confirmed China Telecom's embrace of the RISC-V ecosystem. In summary, as the world's largest Internet of Things market, China is clearly the easiest place for RISC-V to land and develop. China Unicom's formal participation in the CRIVC alliance undoubtedly further improves and enriches the domestic RISC-V ecosystem from the industrial level. Although RISC-V, which is only 12 years old and still "young", is still in the early stage of development, it can be seen from at least the current situation that Chinese enterprises are enthusiastic about developing RISC-V. </span> Source of this article: 物联网智库iot 2023-03-14 For academic sharing only, please indicate the source for reprinting. If there is any infringement, please contact the email：lvzhiqiang@perfxlab.com Delete or Modify ！