In 2020, Andes President Frankwell Lin felt like he was on a roller coaster roaring upwards from the bottom.

Andes, the only Taiwanese supplier of embedded CPU cores and silicon IP, could be called the Taiwanese version of British computer chip design house ARM Holdings. However, in the past Andes has found it difficult to break ARM’s market dominance.

Andes, in which fabless semiconductor company MediaTek holds a 13 percent stake and at which MediaTek CEO Tsai Ming-kai serves as chairman, boasts annual revenue worth NT$580 million. Thanks to the doubling of its share price in the past six months, Andes has emerged as a small cash cow for MediaTek.

The Andes story is the story of how Taiwan put together a “national team” to build a home-grown processor architecture.

Upon graduation from the Department of Electrophysics at National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Lin joined semiconductor manufacturer United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), where he participated in the development of an x86-compatible microprocessor. When UMC subsequently abandoned integrated device manufacturing to become a wafer foundry, Lin was transferred to the UMC-Europe branch office in the Netherlands to serve as general manager and expand the European customer base.

Upon his return to Taiwan, he joined Faraday Technology Corporation, a fabless ASIC/SoC and IP provider founded by former UMC executive Lin Hsiao-ping. There he focused on integrated circuits for a particular purpose or application known as ASIC and process-related intellectual property (IP).

National Team creates “Taiwan core”

In 2005, the government promoted an NSOC Program (National System on Chip Program), led by then NCTU President Chang Chun-yen, comprising five processor projects. One of them was the development of a “Taiwan core” to reduce Taiwan’s dependency on Intel and ARM microprocessor cores, and to complete the most upstream section of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry chain.

Back then, Andes was founded under the leadership of Chang and Tsai, while Lin Hsiao-ping served as the inaugural president. He was later succeeded by current President Frankwell Lin.

No one expected the road to an independently developed processor architecture to be so thorny. 

Upon its founding, Andes posted losses for nine years in a row, burning around NT$1 billion and going through three capital reductions in the process. At one point, they even had to turn to the National Development Fund, which assisted by buying a 43% stake.

“I am very grateful to Chairman Tsai for keeping us on all this time,” says Lin. Tsai even openly promoted Andes, urging companies to use Andes IP more widely. For a long time, MediaTek itself was Andes’ largest customer. 

The company got its name from the world’s longest mountain range, located in Latin America. Why didn’t it opt for Jade, given that Mt. Jade, Taiwan’s highest mountain, does not lack symbolic meaning?

“The first letter needed to be A, and the second letter needed to ensure that we were listed ahead of ARM,” notes Lin in explaining the rationale behind the name choice.

Moreover, Andes’ 200-odd employees taking on ARM, which boasts a 6,000-people workforce, is a David-and-Goliath scenario. A top-level executive who knows ARM’s IC design houses reveals, “In order to prevent competitors from growing stronger, ARM has lowered licensing fees a great deal; they are a big company with lots of business, and small companies are having a hard time.”

Challenging ARM with RISC-V

In 2015, Andes decided to shift to the open-source processor architecture called RISC-V. If Linux is the open-source representative in the software realm, RISC-V could be called the Linux of the processor world because it can be used for any computing device.

(Source: Pei-Yin Hsieh)

In 2010, a research team under David Patterson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, developed a new set of instructions that define the functions of a microprocessor because they were frustrated that Arm was not willing to open up its ecosystem any further. This led to the birth of the RISC-V architecture and the publication of the first user manual in 2014. Patterson and his Berkeley crew then went on to found SiFive, the world’s leading provider of semiconductor IP based on the RISC-V technology.

The Wall Street Journal commented at the time that the development meant that any company could use the RISC-V architecture without having to pay licensing fees to ARM.

Many tech startups quickly embraced RISC-V technology, including Beijing-based Bitmain and Alpha Imaging Technology Corp., which was acquired by MediaTek in 2015. Pingtouge Semiconductor Co. Ltd., a fabless semiconductor company founded by Chinese tech giant Alibaba in 2018, has a team of 400 engineers developing RISC-V-based chips. They released the XuanTie 910 processor in 2019, touting it as the world’s top-performing CPU running on a RISC-V architecture.

After Andes delved into the RISC-V technology, they were able to exploit the experience they had accumulated over many years. In 2017, Andes released its first-generation RISC-V product. Last year, they developed a high-performance multi-core 45-Series of microprocessors that can be used in high-end servers, edge computing, Bluetooth and other wireless communication devices.

Lin was even elected to the board of directors of RISC-V International, a non-profit industry association based in Switzerland. During the daytime, he handles the company’s day-to-day business, and in the evening, during European business hours, he joins video conferences with other association members to stay abreast of tech trends relating to RISC-V.

One semiconductor analyst with a foreign firm finds that in terms of technical prowess, Andes probably ranks second within the global RISC-V camp behind Patterson’s SiFive.

“Their processors are not as high-performing as SiFive’s, but if they aren’t in second place, they are third,” says the analyst.

US-China trade war, Nvidia acquisition of ARM create opportunity

After Andes had worked diligently towards its goal behind the scenes for five years. opportunity suddenly presented itself. First, the technological cold war between China and the United States forced Chinese IC design houses to look for silicon IP providers outside the United States. Ever since, Andes has had difficulties meeting demand.

Then RISC-V International moved its headquarters from the U.S. to Switzerland to demonstrate its independence and impartiality.

Last September, California-based Nvidia Corporation, which supplies graphics processing units, acquired ARM for US$40 billion. Due to the merger, ARM lost the neutral status that it had enjoyed as “the Switzerland of the processor world”. In the industry, voices advocating that companies desert the insufficiently open ARM ecosystem to join the RISC-V camp began to grow louder.

The executive of a Taiwanese chipmaker that is an ARM customer frankly admits that, given that ARM’s neutrality has become tarnished, their company might migrate to the RISC-V architecture. “This is where Andes could truly profit,” the executive predicts.

By 2020, RISC-V architecture products accounted for 59 percent of Andes revenue, including not only IP licenses but also customized RISC-V computing architectures.

Last year, the National Development Fund divested half of its stake in Andes, realizing a net profit of NT$1.6 billion in what counts among the fund’s handful of lucrative investments. Major shareholder and large customer MediaTek meanwhile accounts for less than ten percent of Andes revenue as Andes has solicited more than 180 customers around the globe, enabling it to stand on its own feet.

Having worked at UMC in the 1980s and at Andes after 2000, Lin likes to joke that he has built processors in two centuries. The man at the helm of Andes, who professes that “Even now I am still passionate about processors,” is making sure that Taiwan has a role to play amid this technological paradigm shift.

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Translated by Susanne Ganz
Edited by TC Lin
Uploaded by Penny Chiang