A group of prominent chipmakers is forming a new venture to broaden the adoption of the RISC-V processor architecture. 

The venture, which was unveiled by its backers this morning, will initially focus on the auto chip segment. It will be located in Germany, which is home to many major automakers. The newly formed company plans to expand its focus to other parts of the semiconductor market down the road.

The venture is backed by five publicly traded chipmakers. They include Qualcomm Inc. and Norway-based Nordic Semiconductor ASA, which like Qualcomm operates as a fabless chipmaker. Both companies generate a significant portion of their revenue from selling wireless networking chips.

The new RISC-V’s venture other backers are Robert Bosch GmbH, NXP Semiconductors NV. and Infineon Technologies AG. The three companies are all major chip suppliers to the auto sector. Bosch, for its part, makes not only semiconductors but also a range of other auto components, including batteries.

“Qualcomm Technologies has been investing in RISC-V for more than five years and we’ve integrated RISC-V micro-controllers into many of our commercial platforms,” said Ziad Asghar, Qualcomm’s senior vice president of product management. “We believe RISC-V’s open-source instruction set will increase innovation and has the potential to transform the industry.”

The chipmakers stated today that their new venture will work to advance RISC-V adoption by “enabling next-generation hardware development.” As part of that effort, the company will develop reference architectures. Those are blueprints that make it easier for electronics manufacturers to incorporate new chips into their product designs.

Today’s announcement didn’t specify whether the venture will also design its own RISC-V chips. Although that’s possible, the prospect of the company building such processors is not necessarily likely.

All the chipmakers backing the venture either already use RISC-V or have the resources to build products based on the architecture. If the venture were to make RISC-V chips, it could create competition for its backers. Nordic Semiconductor has a business unit dedicated to commercializing the architecture, while Qualcomm uses it in several of its products.

RISC-V is a collection of blueprints and other technologies that can be used to design central processing units. It’s derived from the RISC microprocessor architecture, which also underpins Arm Ltd.’s CPU designs. The microprocessor architecture is known for its power efficiency and the fact it can help reduce chip manufacturing costs.

RISC-V includes a number of additional features not included in RISC. It offers highly efficient multiplexers, CPU components responsible for fetching data from memory for processing. RISC-V also includes optimizations that speed up certain calculations involving binary numbers, which are basic units of data used in CPUs.

But the perhaps most significant selling point of RISC-V is that it’s free. The architecture is distributed under an open-source license, which means chipmakers that use it don’t have to pay royalty fees like those charged by Arm. Moreover, the fact that RISC-V is open-source gives chipmakers full control of the intellectual property underpinning their products. 

Qualcomm and the other backers of the new RISC-V venture said that despite the initial focus on the auto sector, in the future the venture will expand its focus to the handset and connected device markets.

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