Calista Redmond said there is "a growing demand for custom processors purpose-built to meet the power and performance requirements of specific applications".

She said she had been travelling across the globe to promote the benefits of RISC-V at events and meet with member companies, and level of commitment to drive the mainstream adoption of RISC-V is like nothing she has seen before.

"It's exhilarating to witness our community collaborate across industries and geographies with the shared goal of accelerating the RISC-V ecosystem...With more than 420 organisations, individuals and universities that are members of the RISC-V Foundation, there is a really vibrant community collaborating together to drive the progression of ratified specs, compliance suites and other technical deliverables for the RISC-V ecosystem."

RISC-V has a BSD open source licence, designers are welcome to develop proprietary implementations for commercial use as they see fit. RISC-V offers a variety of commercial benefits, enabling companies to accelerate development time while also reducing strategic risk and overall costs, she said.

"Thanks to these design and cost benefits, I'm confident that members will continue to actively contribute to the RISC-V ecosystem to not only drive innovation forward but benefit their bottom line...I don't have a favourite project, but rather I love the amazing spectrum that RISC-V is engaged in — from a wearable health monitor to scaled-out cloud data centres, from universities in Pakistan to the University of Bologna in Italy or Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, from design tools to foundries, from the most renowned global tech companies to entrepreneurs raising their first round of capital. Our community is broad, deep, growing and energised", Redmond said

The RISC-V ecosystem is poised to significantly grow over the next five years. Semico Research predicts that the market will consume a total of 62.4 billion RISC-V central processing unit (CPU) cores by 2025

"By that time I look forward to seeing many new types of RISC-V implementations including innovative consumer devices, industrial applications, high-performance computing applications and much more... Unlike legacy instruction set architectures (ISAs) which are decades old and are not designed to handle the latest workloads, RISC-V has a variety of advantages including its openness, simplicity, clean-slate design, modularity, extensibility and stability. Thanks to these benefits, RISC-V is ushering in a new era of silicon design and processor innovation", she said.

She claimed that RISC-V "provides the flexibility to create thousands of possible custom processors. Since the implementation is not defined at the ISA level, but rather by the composition of the system-on-chip and other design attributes, engineers can choose to go big, small, powerful or lightweight with their designs".