Modern industrial systems must operate with high precision, reliability and energy efficiency. This is made possible by modern computer chips, which are an indispensable part of the electronics value chain across all application domains such as consumer electronics, industrial automation, communications, energy, healthcare, automotive, aerospace and financial systems. Chips cover a wide range of tasks, from simple sensor data processing (microcontrollers) to highly complex control and data processing tasks with artificial intelligence (high-performance computing). Around 1 trillion chips were produced worldwide in 2020, and this figure is expected to double by 2030, particularly due to strong demand in the automotive sector, according to the European Commission’s chip survey.

Over the decades, the chip industry has positioned itself globally and optimized itself to minimize costs. As a result, the supply chains for the various components of all chips are internationally distributed and highly specialized. One class of such components are the so-called design IPs, the functional building blocks of each chip, such as processor cores, AI accelerators or memory connections. For this reason, European chip manufacturers are dependent on design IPs and other components from outside Europe, namely from the USA, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. The most modern chip factories (so-called chip fabs) with high production capacity are located in these countries. Not only the finished physical chips, but also critical chip component designs, in particular design IPs for energy-efficient and high-performance processors, often have to be sourced from outside the EU.

In order to further develop chip technology in Europe, the EU Commission passed the European Chips Act, which came into force in September 2023. This has set itself the goal of ensuring the security of supply of chips in Europe, continuously monitoring the market and defining measures for crisis situations (supply bottlenecks). The EU had a share of around 10 percent of the global chip market in 2020; the Chips Act is expected to double this figure by 2030. Another goal is to expand the European semiconductor infrastructure using synergies from EU-wide research projects.

Strengthening the European chip industry

One of these projects to strengthen the European chip industry is TRISTAN (Together for RISc-V Technology and ApplicatioNs). This research project was initiated at the end of 2022 as part of the EU’s Chips JU (Joint Undertaking) and is a cooperation of 46 partners, including universities, research institutes and industrial partners, to develop open source technologies in the context of RISC-V (V stands for the number five) or alternatives to proprietary commercially available chip designs.

The EU research project TRISTAN is developing open source technologies as alternatives to proprietary commercial chip designs.

The project partners also include Siemens, whose Electronic Design Automation (EDA) unit plays a central role in the global market for chip development. Siemens is one of the top 3 suppliers of development tools for chips and printed circuit boards worldwide. In addition to all the steps involved in creating the blueprint for chips, chip design also includes procedures for testing and diagnosing the manufactured chips. A number of tools are therefore required along the chip development process to ensure functional logical correctness, correct physical implementation and fast and complete testing of the manufactured chips. Siemens is the technology and world market leader for some of the key steps in this development chain.

Integrated Circuits and Electronics (ICE) is one of Siemens’ most important fields of research and development. Siemens Austria plays an important role in this field with the management of this global technology field and two research groups within the technology field (Electronics Design and Integrated Circuits as well as Electronics Communication and Radio Frequency). “Current events in global trade policy have made the subject of TRISTAN’s research even more important. TRISTAN makes a significant contribution to reducing dependencies on Europe’s chip industry in the field of design IPs,” emphasizes Herbert Taucher, head of the global Siemens ICE technology field.

“Current events in global trade policy have made the subject of TRISTAN's research even more important.“

Herbert Taucher, Head of the global Siemens technology field ICE (Integrated Circuits and Electronics)

TRISTAN is currently in its third year and focuses on low to mid-performance RISC-V processors, processor peripherals, software development tools and libraries as well as electronic design automation. The open source results from TRISTAN will be made available to the public on the Tristan-Isolde Unified Access Page (together with the EU partner project ISOLDE).

“RISC-V is a new possibility in chip development that offers a license-free and open source-based Instruction Set Architecture (ISA),” explains Bernhard Fischer, TRISTAN project manager at Siemens. Open source means that the program code is open source, i.e. freely accessible and modifiable. The ISA specification defines the instruction set (instructions) of a processor that it can execute. RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer – this means that the number of instructions supported by the processor is small and their complexity has been kept simple (in contrast to CISC). This makes a RISC-V chip easier to implement. RISC-V has also established itself as an important technology for training and teaching at universities.

“Over the next two years, the number of RISC-V-based system-on-chips delivered is expected to roughly double.“

Bernhard Fischer, TRISTAN Project Manager, Electronics Design and Integrated Circuits Research Group, Siemens Austria

However, there is also a growing commercial market for RISC-V design IPs and RISC-V-based chips. “In the next two years, the number of RISCV-based SoCs (system-on-chip) delivered is expected to roughly double,” says Fischer, who works in the Electronics Design and Integrated Circuits research group at Siemens Austria. A similar business model is now being developed around RISC-V as exists for the established (proprietary) processor architectures. This is generally based on costs for design IPs and license fees for the chips produced.

“Our EDA tools are already able to support the new, growing technologies around RISC-V. By collaborating with the RISC-V ecosystem, we want to make greater use of the advantages of RISC-V for our own hardware-based products in the future,” says Martin Matschnig from Siemens Austria, Head of the Electronics Design and Integrated Circuits research group. “The aim is to expand our existing EDA portfolio specifically for the development of RISC-V-based chips,” says Matschnig. “We want to use the individual adaptability of RISC-V to automatically identify and implement the specific capabilities that a RISC-V chip needs. We are also working on the TRISTAN project to support the verification of RISC-V-based systems using AI. The aim is to find the causes of errors in a more targeted manner and to be able to find errors earlier thanks to intelligent prioritization,” adds Bernhard Fischer.

“By collaborating with the RISC-V ecosystem, we want to make greater use of the advantages of RISC-V for our own hardware-based products in the future.“

Martin Matschnig, Head of the Electronics Design and Integrated Circuits research group, Siemens Austria

TRISTAN has received funding from the Chips Joint Undertaking (Chips JU) under grant agreement nr. 101095947. The Chips JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon Europe’s research and innovation programs. TRISTAN receives top-up funding by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) and the program “ICT of the Future” of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK).