Can Open-Source Semiconductors Upend the Chip Industry?

Tracy Alloway (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:15)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:17)

So Joe, we just can't get away from semiconductors.

Joe Weisenthal (0:23)

You know, I thought we were gonna end it with our five episode series, but the people are clamoring for more chips, Tracy. That's just a fact.

Can't get away from it.

Tracy Alloway (0:33)

Yeah, it's one of those, just when you thought you were out, they pull you back in kind of things. Okay, so by popular request, this is a bonus episode to our Semiconductor series. It's gonna be a little bit different to the other ones because we're going to be talking about a new technology, a new sort of, how do I explain this? Well, I guess it's an open source hardware technology that could have a big impact on the chips industry and the way things have traditionally been done.

Joe Weisenthal (1:03)

Right, so a lot of our discussion has sort of talked about a few like basic business models. I mean, we've talked about Intel and the sort of integrated chip design and fab model.

Tracy Alloway (1:15)

Foundry versus fab.

Joe Weisenthal (1:16)

Yeah, and then the fabless semiconductor companies which have given rise to the contract manufacturer are Taiwan Semi, which is sort of the ultimate fab. So we've sort of like got this sort of like broad contours of the industry, but in terms of like interesting new technologies or different directions or totally different models of how things could go, still more to be discovered.

Tracy Alloway (1:38)

Yeah, that's exactly right. So someone told us that we had to talk to this particular company because they were one of the leaders in trying to commercialize this open source hardware idea. It's called RISC-5. It's, let me see if I can pull it up. It's R-I-S-C and then five, RISC-5.

So what we're going to do is actually learn about what the technology is and then dive in a little bit to what it might mean for existing chip makers and how the whole ecosystem of semiconductors actually works.

Joe Weisenthal (2:16)

I can't wait. I don't know anything about any of this stuff. So I just want to learn more.

Tracy Alloway (2:21)

Yeah. Okay. We're all learning together. So without further ado, let's bring on Chris Lattner. He's the president of product and engineering over at SiFive.

He's also a long time tech guy and quite famous in the industry for reasons that we will get in. So Chris, welcome to Odd Lots.

Chris Lattner (2:40)

Hey, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Tracy Alloway (2:43)

Could you maybe give us a snapshot, the elevator pitch for Risk5 before we begin?

Chris Lattner (2:51)

Sure. Sounds great. Let's start with what is Risk5. So when you start talking about these companies, companies like Intel or Arm or AMD, things like this, they generally make processors. And so the processor in your computer, its job is to run software. And there's this complicated dance that happens between the software and the hardware. And the thing that mediates it, the thing that lives in between these two worlds is a thing called an instruction set.

That instruction set is often proprietary. And so with Intel, for example, they'll use an instruction set called x86.

Arm has a set of instruction sets that they named after themselves. They have the Arm instruction set. There are many, many of these things that have existed over the years. A company called MIPS.

Joe Weisenthal (3:33)

I remember MIPS.

Chris Lattner (3:35)

A company you may remember ages ago called Sun had an instruction set called Spark. And many of these things existed and they were designed for different configurations.

Now these have all worked and these have been a good thing. And obviously we have a lot of successful computers today, but there's a problem. The problem is that the software and the hardware last longer than the companies do sometimes. And so MIPS, for example, is in bankruptcy these days. Sun kind of went away and Spark is in a different world. And so one of the challenges that you end up having as a device manufacturer, as a software provider, is that you need something that will survive.

And companies in general go through changes and as an industry, it's always evolving, it's a fast-paced world. Now there's another challenge with this, which is also when you have a company that's tied to a specific instruction set that they create, you only have a single provider. This can sometimes be limiting if you're building a series of devices around one company's technology, both if they go away, but also you don't have as much market pressure pushing them to innovate and pushing them to, you know, have reasonable charges and rates and things like this.