A few days ago, Qualcomm bought RISC-V developer Ventana Micro Systems. What seems like a simple buy on the surface is anything but to SemiAccurate.
The idea is simple enough, Qualcomm has purchased a firm with a lot of engineers who have deep knowledge in developing RISC-V (RV) cores. Qualcomm has a lot of high quality, high profile ARM core developers, and the results of their efforts on the core side are quite good too. The end product may be unacceptable, but the cores and SoC are pretty damn good. This team was not organically built, it came from Qualcomm purchasing Nuvia in 2021 and then making the best of the talent.
So Qualcomm bought a team and didn’t screw it up totally like some companies, something that is both hard to do and kind of rare in this industry. That means Qualcomm buying Ventana is more or less them doing the same thing with a RV player, hopefully with similar results. There are two problems with that idea, first is that Qualcomm has a lot of RV experience in house now, and engineering talent to make use of it.
Qualcomm has more than dabbled with RV cores, they have taped out several and likely have many serious ongoing efforts to do more. SemiAccurate first wrote up the early efforts in 2020 and the project(s) have had a rather rocky road since then. Most of this up and down was due to the ARM/Qualcomm lawsuit over the Nuvia purchase and licensing. Short story is that Qualcomm won over ARM handily which seems to have put the brakes on the rather extensive RV efforts at Qualcomm. Not killed them mind you but what SemiAccurate heard was a potential total shift away from ARM cores is now specific devices at the lower end of things. This is the long way of saying that Qualcomm is well steeped in RV design and development.
So if they have the engineering talent, have the RV knowledge, and have a world class silicon team, why buy Ventana? There is one missing piece of information here that puts it all together, and then the purchase makes complete sense. For Qualcomm, this was a need to fill what looks like a serious hole, not adding to what they have now.
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Disclosures: Charlie Demerjian and Stone Arch Networking Services, Inc. have no consulting relationships, investment relationships, or hold any investment positions with any of the companies mentioned in this report.
