Looking Back on 2021: Strong Growth Momentum of RISC-V Market

As more and more international technology companies are embracing RISC-V and expanding their market and applications, Andes is determined to continue to drive the RISC-V momentum as the leading pure play processor IP vendor. By leveraging years of extensive experience helping customers achieve mass production of diversified products, Andes will support even more RISC-V SoC design teams to introduce innovative products. Looking ahead to 2022, Andes will recruit more R&D talents around the world. Based on the solid foundation of product portfolio, Andes will extend it to cover more high-value and high-end products and address the demand for high-performance RISC-V computing solutions and grow along with the booming market. Here, let’s go over the milestones Andes achieved in 2021.

New Milestones

  • Andes achieved record high annual revenue of NT$819 million in 2021, which represents 41 percent year-over-year growth.
  • The monthly revenue of December hit record high of NT$137 million.
  • Annual shipment of SoCs embedded with Andes CPU cores reached 3 billion in 2021 which represents over 50 percent year-over-year growth. Since inception, the cumulative shipments surpassed a remarkable record of 10 billion.
  • As of 2021, the cumulative number of IP license contracts exceeded 370. Design wins included many leading companies, such as MediaTek, Renesas, SK Telecom, EdgeQ, HPMicro, Kneron and many others.
  • The applications of Andes’ licensees are diversified. The top five customer applications are AI, Touch Panel, Wireless/IoT, MCU and 5G in 2021.
  • Over 20,000 installations of AndeSight™ IDE.


Innovative Products

  • Andes RISC-V superscalar multicore A(X)45MP and vector Processor NX27V upgraded their spec and performance.
  • Andes released AndeSight™ IDE v5.0: a comprehensive software solution to accelerate RISC-V AI and IoT developments.
  • Andes launched AndesBoardFarm to enable SoC designers to explore and evaluate Andes’ RISC-V processors in online FPGA board collection.
  • COPILOT (Custom-OPtimized Instruction deveLOpment Tools™) v5.4 was upgraded with additional Streaming Port feature.

 

Strategic Partnership

  • More than 500 ecosystem partners. 
  • Ashling’s RiscFree™ Toolchain extended to support the broad range of Andes RISC-V CPU IPs. 
  • Andes partnered with Codeplay Software to achieve software first SoC design for AI-based applications using RISC-V vector processors.
  • Andes and Cyberon collaborated to provide edge-computing voice recognition solution on DSP-capable RISC-V processors.
  • IAR Systems extended development tools performance capabilities for Andes RISC-V cores.
  • Andes partnered with PUFsecurity to integrate crypto coprocessor PUFiot into RISC-V AIoT security platform.
  • Andes and Rafael Microelectronics announced a strategic partnership to provide high power efficiency wireless IP solutions for IoT devices.
  • Andes collaborated with Rambus to offer secure solution for MCU and IoT applications.
  • Silex Insight and Andes Technology extended strategic partnership to deliver flexible and scalable root-of-trust security IP solution.

Global Presence

  • Andes issued its overseas Global Depositary Receipt (GDR) on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange, making Andes the only international public RISC-V CPU IP supplier. The funding allows Andes to boost investing in R&D and expanding its RISC-V product lines, especially high-end products. 
  • To seize the market of high-end multicore CPU IPs, Andes’ design centers in Taiwan, United States and Canada launched an expansion plan to recruit 200 R&D talents in the coming 3-5 years to develop the next-generation RISC-V products.
  • Jonah McLeod, Marketing Director of Andes Technology USA Corp., was elected as Chair of Marketing Committee of RISC-V International Association to lead its members around the world to promote RISC-V applications and expand ecosystem.

Awards & Accolades

  • Andes won “Mittelstand Award” held by Minister of Economic Affairs in Taiwan with its unique and highly competitive technology.
  • Andes won “Featured IoT Cybersecurity Chip Supplier” of 2021 EE Awards Asia hosted by EE Times and EDN. Its vector processor IP NX27V also won “Best EDA/IP of the Year” in the product category.
  • Frankwell Lin, Chairman and CEO, was awarded “Outstanding Manager Award” by Professional Management Association of Hsinchu, Taiwan.
  • Dr. Charlie Su, President and CTO, won RISC-V Technical Contributor Award in recognition of his contribution as Vice Chair of the RISC-V International Technical Steering Committee. 

Event Presence

  • At 2021 RISC-V Summit, Andes presented four talks covering the hottest RISC-V technology development and applications, including AndesCore™, IOPMP, TVM auto-scheduler and Zephyr RTOS.
  • Andes hosted nearly 40 RISC-V webinars and meetups, including RISC-V CON Hsinchu and RISC-V CON China, to share new market trends and the latest technologies with 3,000+ RISC-V enthusiasts all over the world.
  • Andes joined more than 50 major industry events and presented over 80 technical talks around the world to promote and reach customers despite the pandemic. The events included AI Hardware Summit, AIoT Taiwan, China Semiconductor Executive Summit, ChipEx, ChipExpo, Clientron Automotive Forum, Cloud & Fog Computing Ecosystem Forum, COMPUTEX, CTHPC, DATE, EE Awards Asia Ceremony, ELEXCON, Embedded World, GSA Asia-Pacific Executive Forum: 5G panel, GSA Silicon Leadership Summit, ICCAD, IP SoC Day Grenoble, Linley Fall Conference, Micro-Electronics Wearables Forum, RISC-V Forum (Security/ Developer Tools/ Embedded Technologies/ Vector & Machine Learning), RISC-V Meetup (Austin/Boston), RISC-V Summit, RISC-V Taipei Day, RISC-V Tokyo Day (Spring/Fall), RISC-V Week, RISC-V World Conference China, SemIsrael, TechTaipei, TSMC OIP Forum (NA/CN/EMEA), TSMC Technology Symposium (NA/TW/EMEA), VLSI-CAD, VLSI-DAT and many others.
Continue ReadingLooking Back on 2021: Strong Growth Momentum of RISC-V Market

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.
Continue ReadingA Look Back at 2020: Another Strong Year of Growth for Andes despite the Pandemic