Switzerland is at the centre of a quiet rebellion in chip design
RISC-V offers an open-source alternative to Intel and ARM chip architectures, aiming to reduce global dependence on proprietary designs.
A Swiss-based open-source technology is quietly challenging the semiconductor industry’s concentration of power, in which most of the world’s digital devices depend on instruction set architectures licensed by just two companies: Intel in the US and ARM in the UK.
The RISC-V International Association, headquartered in Zurich since 2020, maintains an open-source alternative that allows chip designers to build without paying licensing fees or seeking permission from governments that control proprietary architectures.
The appeal has grown considerably. The association now counts more than 4,500 members, including US heavyweights such as Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google alongside Chinese giants Huawei, Tencent, and Alibaba, with Nvidia alone shipping over a billion RISC-V cores in 2024.
Switzerland’s political neutrality has been central to the association’s appeal, with its CEO Andrea Gallo describing the Zurich base as ‘a testament to our neutrality across all time zones, geographies and cultures.’
However, experts caution that RISC-V still faces a steep climb before it can challenge industry leaders. Frank Gürkaynak of ETH Zurich noted that the real challenge is not building a processor but assembling the entire software ecosystem around it, a task requiring hundreds of years of combined working hours.
The association is now collaborating with Linux to create an open-source trio of software, architecture, and hardware, with ambitions for RISC-V to become the global ISA of choice.
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