A Look Back at 2020: Another Strong Year of Growth for Andes despite the Pandemic

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.
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Andes Technology Corp. Announces EdgeQ to Deliver Converged 5G and AI Silicon Platform with AndesCore™ RISC-V License for the 5G Open Radio Access Network

EdgeQ RISC-V based Highly Programmable 5G and AI Platform
Addresses a Multi-Trillion Dollar 5G Market Opportunity

Andes Technology Corporation (TWSE: 6533), a leading supplier of high efficiency, low-power 32/64-bit RISC-V processor cores and founding premier member of RISC-V International, today announced that EdgeQ, a leading innovator in 5G base station-on-a-chip, will utilize an AndesCore™ RISC-V license to deliver industry’s first fully open and programmable 5G platform with integrated AI. EdgeQ has licensed the Andes core with Andes Custom Extension™ (ACE). ACE enables EdgeQ to design, extend, and customize their own instruction sets to achieve novel performance, features, and power profiles unmet by today’s solutions for the wireless infrastructure.  

EdgeQ’s platform targets a 5G market that will enable $13.2 trillion of global economic output by 2035, according to the Omdia report “The 5G Economy“. The 5G value chain will invest an average of $235 billion annually to continually expand and strengthen the 5G technology base within network and business application infrastructure.

“We are excited and proud to have our RISC-V AndesCore incorporated into EdgeQ’s ambitious program to develop their 5G and AI silicon platform,” said Andes Technology President, Frankwell Lin. “Having been developed concurrent with the emergence of 5G and artificial intelligence, the 32-bit A25 processor with DSP/SIMD and floating point extensions was able to anticipate the unique computing requirements of these technologies. Using Andes ACE to easily extend the RISC-V ISA for custom requirements offers EdgeQ’s design teams the freedom to more precisely configure the performance, power consumption, and die area of their final silicon.” 

“EdgeQ was founded with the vision to provide an open programmable 5G platform that the industry can freely innovate and differentiate in a frictionless manner. Our clean-slate approach starts with a uniquely open RISC-V ISA based design that is deployable from the onset and easily modifiable by customers via open-source RISC-V tools,” said Hariprasad Gangadharan, Head of Silicon Engineering of EdgeQ. “We are pleased to have Andes as a technology partner whose proven RISC-V IP not only realizes our product vision, but at its heart offers a customizable instruction set ideal for innovators like us to shape the world in a disruptively innovative manner.” 

About EdgeQ
EdgeQ is a leading innovator in 5G systems-on-a-chip. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, with offices in San Diego, CA and Bangalore, India. Led by executives from Qualcomm, Intel, and Broadcom, EdgeQ is pioneering a converged connectivity and AI that is fully software-customizable and programmable. The company is backed by leading investors, including Threshold Partners, Fusion Fund and AME Cloud Ventures, among others. To learn more about EdgeQ, visit www.edgeq.io 

About Andes Technology
Fifteen years in business and a founding Premier member of RISC-V International, Andes is a leading supplier of high-performance/low-power 32/64-bit embedded processor IP solutions, and a main force to take RISC-V mainstream. Andes’ fifth generation AndeStar™ architecture adopted the RISC-V as the base. Its V5 RISC-V CPU families range from tiny 32-bit cores to advanced 64-bit cores with DSP, FPU, Vector, Linux, superscalar  and/or multicore capabilities. The annual volume of Andes-Embedded SoCs has exceeded 2 billion since 2020. For more information, please visit https://www.andestech.com

Continue ReadingAndes Technology Corp. Announces EdgeQ to Deliver Converged 5G and AI Silicon Platform with AndesCore™ RISC-V License for the 5G Open Radio Access Network

Andes Technology and Rafael Microelectronics Announce a Strategic Partnership to Provide High Power Efficiency Wireless IP Solutions for IoT Devices

HSINCHU, TAIWAN – January 14, 2021 – Andes Technology, a global leader in 32/64-bit RISC-V CPU core solutions, and Rafael Microelectronics, a leading provider for RF IP and wireless communication subsystem cores, are announcing a strategic partnership to bring a wireless IoT connectivity solution based on RISC-V cores to the industry.

Wireless subsystem IPs from Rafael Microelectronics are complete solutions that enable protocols of IoT connectivity to run on AndesCore™ ultra-compact N22 processor. Rafael Microelectronics offers Bluetooth® Low Energy version 5.0/5.1/5.2, Zigbee version 3.0 and full frequency band of sub gigahertz subsystems with radio designs targeting on various process nodes. The N22, a highly efficient and low-power 2-stage pipeline RISC-V CPU core, can work tightly with Rafael’s wireless subsystems to provide full control of MAC layer, Network layer and Application layer functions efficiently. The configurable wireless subsystem IPs also supply a wide-range selection of data link control for IoT devices.

“We are proud to deliver Bluetooth® Low Energy, ZigBee, WiSun and various communication IPs to SoC makers who need embedded connectivity solutions”, says Ted Sun, CEO at Rafael Microelectronics and he continues; “Combining Rafael’s RF and communication IP technology with Andes’ N22 RISC-V CPU core, we proudly offer customers our low-power, cost-effective and high-sensitivity radio solutions for their competitive wireless SoCs.”

“Wireless connectivity embedded in SoC becomes more essential for power and cost sensitive applications,” said Dr. Charlie Su, CTO and Executive VP of Andes Technology. “We are excited that the integration of our RISC-V processor core N22 with Rafael Microelectronics’ wireless subsystem IPs brings highly competitive IoT connectivity solutions to SoC vendors.”

These wireless subsystem solutions are perfect for IoT related applications and are available now from Rafael Microelectronics.

About Andes Technology
Fifteen years in business and a founding Premier member of RISC-V International. Andes is a leading supplier of high-performance/low-power 32/64-bit embedded processor IP solutions, and a main force to take RISC-V mainstream. Andes’ fifth-generation AndeStar™ architecture adopted the RISC-V as the base. Its V5 RISC-V CPU families range from tiny 32-bit cores to advanced 64-bit cores with DSP, FPU, Vector, Linux, dual-issue and/or multicore capabilities. The annual volume of Andes-Embedded SoCs is exceeding 2 billion since 2020, For more information, please visit www.andestech.com

About Rafael Microelectronics
Founded in 2006, Rafael Microelectronics is a recognized market-leading RF IC company with focus on TV and satellite tuners products. With its strong competence in RF technology, Rafael initiated RF IP and wireless subsystem IP business for IoT markets in 2017. The RF IP and wireless subsystem IP solutions from Rafael Microelectronics include Bluetooth® Low Energy, Dual Mode Bluetooth®, IEEE 802.15.4 radio, ZigBee, WiSun and custom RF IP development. Rafael also supports related communication firmware and test methodologies. Due to complexity of integrating RF communication function into an SoC, Rafael also offers Turn-Key service for Wireless SoC design service based on Andes cores. Rafael is a publicly traded company with headquarter located in Hsinchu, Taiwan. For more information please visit: www.rafaelmicro.com

Continue ReadingAndes Technology and Rafael Microelectronics Announce a Strategic Partnership to Provide High Power Efficiency Wireless IP Solutions for IoT Devices

Andes Technology Provides RISC-V CPU Core to SK Telecom

HSINCHU, TAIWAN – January 7, 2021 – Andes Technology Corp. today announced that its 64-bit AndesCore™ AX25 RISC-V processor has been adopted by SK Telecom (hereinafter referred to as “SKT”), Korea’s leading ICT company, for the development of artificial intelligence products.  Andes Technology is a leading supplier of RISC-V CPU cores. Its IP cores now are embedded in excess of 5-Billion SoCs covering a wide range of applications.

“We expect Andes Technology’s 64-bit AX25 based on RISC-V, armed with its high performance efficiency and rich configurations, to serve as the ideal controller solution for diverse NN applications on our high-performance AI chips,” said Chung Moo-kyoung, Project Leader of AI Accelerator at SKT. “We will continue to focus on innovating user experiences by realizing advanced AI technologies and solutions.”

“We are excited to collaborate with SKT by providing our processor AX25 to be a key component of SKT’s deep learning SoCs,”  said Andes President Frankwell Lin. “The growing intelligent devices call for SoCs with ever more complex computing capabilities. To meet the increasing demands from customers, all Andes V5 processors support RISC-V ratified spec and thus fully benefit from expanding RISC-V ecosystem; in addition, they come with extensive configurable features for embedded applications and user-friendly software development environment.” For example, Andes supports vector interrupt and unaligned access for better performance efficiency and novel features such as PowerBrake, QuickNap™ for additional power saving; StackSafe™ for stack overflow/underflow protection; and CoDense™ for additional code density enhancement on top of RISC-V C-extension.

AndesCore AX25 is equipped with RISC-V P-extension (RVP) ISA to efficiently manipulate multiple data sets simultaneously in one instruction and assist various AI computations. It is also perfect for control-oriented tasks with features such as dynamic branch prediction, instruction/data caches and local memories for low-latency accesses. ECC soft error protection is also supported. Complementing the hardware is AndeSight™, a feature-rich and intuitive integrated development environment. Furthermore, Andes Custom Extension™ (ACE) is a powerful framework to enable custom instruction design to realize domain specific acceleration with high degree of programmability within a reduced development time.

About Andes Technology
Fifteen years in business and a Founding Premier member of RISC-V International, Andes is a leading supplier of high-performance/low-power 32/64-bit embedded processor IP solutions, and a main force to take RISC-V mainstream. Andes’ fifth-generation AndeStar™ architecture adopted the RISC-V as the base. Its V5 RISC-V CPU families range from tiny 32-bit cores to advanced 64-bit cores with DSP, FPU, Vector, Linux, dual-issue and/or multicore capabilities. The annual volume of Andes-Embedded SoCs is exceeding 2 billion since 2020. For more information, please visit https://www.andestech.com.

Continue ReadingAndes Technology Provides RISC-V CPU Core to SK Telecom

Andes Technology Passes DUNS Registered™ Certificate

Andes Technology announces the pass the DUNS Registered™ Certificate. Andes Technology believes that it can win more visibility and trust from overseas customers by the D&B certification. Through showcasing a D&B-verified and validated business profile, Andes Technology will be able to demonstrate its credibility in front of its prospects and business partners as a commercial entity registered in the world’s largest commercial database.

About DUNS
The Data Universal Numbering System, abbreviated as DUNS or D-U-N-S, is a proprietary system developed and managed by Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) that assigns a unique numeric identifier, referred to as a “DUNS number” to a single business entity. The D-U-N-S Number is used in various countries in the world.

How to Check Andes Technology D-U-N-S number?
Input the company name “Andes” or try the D-U-N-S number 658686352 into the search box on https://www.dunsregistered.com/

About Andes Technology
Fifteen years in business and a founding Premier member of RISC-V International, Andes is a leading supplier of high-performance/low-power 32/64-bit embedded processor IP solutions, and a main force to take RISC-V mainstream. Andes’ fifth-generation AndeStar™ architecture adopted the RISC-V as the base. Its V5 RISC-V CPU families range from tiny 32-bit cores to advanced 64-bit cores with DSP, FPU, Vector, Linux, dual-issue and/or multicore capabilities. The annual volume of Andes-Embedded SoCs has exceeded 1 billion since 2018. For more information, please visit https://www.andestech.com. 

Continue ReadingAndes Technology Passes DUNS Registered™ Certificate