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upstart writes:

UK chip firm XMOS picks RISC-V for next-gen microcontrollers:

RISC-V Summit British chip company XMOS has revealed its latest xcore high-performance microcontrollers are to be built around the RISC-V open standard instruction set architecture, in the hopes of opening up the silicon to a wider range of embedded system designers.

Unveiled at the RISC-V Summit in San Jose, which starts today, the fourth generation of xcore chips will ditch the proprietary instruction set architecture the company used until now.

This will enable the xcore 400 family to benefit from a broader ecosystem of developer tools and the company also hopes it will appeal to a wider audience of developers and designers.

"We've always been very positively disposed towards open source, and this really is an extension of that philosophy, if you like," XMOS CEO Mark Lippett told The Register.

"So we've always used LLVM compilers and GDB debuggers, for example, but this gives our customers access to a much richer set of tools that that may or may not have been developed with XMOS, and frankly, that's a more capital efficient model for us, because we don't have to develop those things, as there are companies that are focused just on those technologies, and we're very happy to benefit from them, and we think our customers will very much appreciate that as well," he added.

Based at Bristol in the west of England, XMOS is a fabless semiconductor company, but it actually sells the chips directly to customers, unlike fellow Brit chip company Arm, which licenses its designs to others.

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