In 2020, although the COVID-19 pandemic had a severe impact on the global economy, Andes Technology still made significant advances and achievements in the development of RISC-V. As a leading supplier of RISC-V processors and world-class creator/maintainer of RISC-V related development environments, Andes will continue to form alliances with related industries, expand ecosystems and lead the trend of the next generation RISC-V technology. In 2021, Andes will keep devoting itself to driving innovation and taking RISC-V mainstream!
Global Presence
- Andes Technology stepped up to the Founding Premier Member of RISC-V International.
- President Frankwell Lin was elected as Board Director of RISC-V International..
- Dr. Charlie Su, CTO and EVP, was elected as Vice Chair of RISC-V International Technical Steering Committee.
- Florian Wohlrab, Sales Director of Europe and Japan, became one of the first RISC-V Ambassadors.
Innovative Products
- After releasing the first RISC-V processor supporting the DSP extended instruction set in 2019, Andes launched the first RISC-V vector processor in 2020.
- Andes announced new RISC-V AndesCore™ processors: superscalar 45-series with multi-core support and 27-series with level-2 cache controller.
- Software: The LLVM tool chain was also launched to support RISC-V vector extension and AI applications. AndeClarity™ Vector Pipeline Analyzer is the first and the best tool in the RISC-V industry to optimize the processor pipeline with visual interface. Other achievements include the enhancements of Linux, porting AndesCore to a variety of RTOS and keeping the leading position of RISC-V commercial tool chain in both performance and code size.
New Milestones
- In December 2020, Andes’ monthly revenue exceeded USD$ 3.5 million (NTD$ 100 million).
- Over 200 commercial licensees, geographically distributed in Taiwan, North America, China, South Korea, Japan and Europe.
- The cumulative number of IP license contracts exceeded 400. In 2020, design wins included many world-leading companies, such as MediaTek, Renesas and SK Telecom.
- Royalty revenue grew by nearly 50%.
- Nearly 20,000 installations of AndeSight™ IDE.
- Annual shipment of SoCs embedded with Andes CPU cores surpassed 2 billion in 2020.
- The top three rankings of revenue by regions are Taiwan (43%), the United States (26%) and China (25%) in 2020.
- The applications of Andes’ licensees are diversified. In the first three quarters of 2020, the top five customer applications are Video & Audio (24%), MCU (17%), IoT (14%), AI (10%), and Sensing (7%).
Awards & Recognition
- Andes Technology was ranked among “100 Fastest-Growing Companies” in 2020 by CommonWealth Magazine, one of the most influential magazines in Taiwan.
- President Frankwell Lin won ERSO Award, a high honor in the semiconductor industry in Taiwan, because of his contribution to developing Taiwan’s original embedded CPU architecture and licensing business model, making Andes becoming the first commercial CPU IP supplier in Asia.
- President Frankwell Lin was invited as the award presenter at the GSA (Global Semiconductor Alliance) Award Ceremony.
- The first RISC-V vector processor core, AndesCore NX27V, won “Hsinchu Science Park Innovative Product Award” and “Outstanding Product Performance of the Year” of ASPENCORE World Electronics Achievement Awards.
- Dr. Chuanhau Chang, Assistant Vice President of Architecture R&D Division, won RISC-V Top Technical Contributor Awards in recognition of his contribution to RISC-V Architecture.
- Andes passed DUNS Registered™ Certificate, demonstrating its credibility as a commercial entity registered in the world’s largest commercial database.
Strategic Partnership
- More than 145 ecosystem partners.
- Development environment: IAR supports RISC-V P Extension which is contributed to the community by Andes. Other partners supporting AndesCore and its development environments include Cyberon, Imperas, Lauterbach, Menta, Open AI Lab, SEGGER, UltraSoC, etc.
- Security partners including Hex-Five, PUFsecurity, Rambus, Secure-IC, Silex Insight, Tiempo, and Veridify have worked with Andes from different aspects to strengthen the security and protection mechanism of RISC-V AndesCore.
- As for AI applications, Andes collaborated with Deeplite to launch a faster, smaller ,and more accurate AI model optimizer. Also, Andes has made remarkable progress in its neural network computing library (Andes NN Library).
Event Presence
- At 2020 RISC-V Summit, Andes presented six talks covering the hottest RISC-V topics, including AndesCore™, Vector Extension, AndesClarity™ and IOPMP.
- Andes hosted more than 40 RISC-V webinars and meetups to share new market trends and the latest technologies with more than 3,000 RISC-V enthusiasts all over the world.
- Andes joined more than 50 major industry events around the world to promote and reach customers despite the pandemic. The events included Embedded World, RISC-V Meetup (Hsinchu, Munich, Toronto), TSMC Online Technology Symposium (China, EU, Japan, Taiwan, and US), EDN Forum, IP SoC Day Online (Shanghai, Grenoble), DAC (San Francisco), VLSI-CAD, D-Forum 2020, VLSI -DAT , RISC-V Global Forum, RISC-V Tokyo Day, RISC-V Vietnam Day, RISC-V Taipei Day , Linley Fall Processor Conference, EEPW IoT Developers Live Chat, ICCAD 2020, GSA Award Dinner, TSES Hsinchu, RISC-V 10th Anniversary, Hsinchu Science Park 40th Anniversary Celebration Ceremony, and RISC-V Summit.
