Andes Technology Brand Guidelines: Hsinchu’s 2005 CPU IP House, Now Built on RISC-V

A CPU project spun out in Hsinchu.

Andes Technology Corporation — 晶心科技 in Chinese — was set up in Hsinchu Science Park, Taiwan, in 2005; Chinese Wikipedia dates its founding to March 2005. The company sells no chips of its own. It designs processor cores and licenses them as intellectual property, so that other companies can build those cores into their own systems-on-chip and have them made by a foundry.

Its founding grew out of Taiwan’s chip-design industry. The company’s management page names Tsai Ming-kai, the chairman of MediaTek, as its founder, says he began leading the founding of Andes in 2004, and says he was its chairman from 2005 to 2021. The same page names Frankwell Lin as a co-founder: after years at UMC he joined Faraday Technology, and in 2004, the company says, he began leading the spin-off of Faraday’s CPU project. Lin became Andes’ president in 2006 and its chairman and chief executive in 2021, the company says. Chinese Wikipedia describes the aim at the start as building a “Taiwan heart” — a home-grown CPU — in step with a government programme of the time.

For its first decade Andes sold cores built on its own instruction-set architecture, AndeStar V3, which Chinese Wikipedia describes as patented and as mixing 16-bit and 32-bit instructions. Its shares were first traded on Taiwan’s emerging-stock market on 6 August 2015, and on 14 March 2017 it made its main-board debut on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, the Taipei Times reported the next day. That report described Andes as a subsidiary of MediaTek, named Tsai as chairman of both companies, and said Andes then supplied processor IP for communications, touch-screen and storage chips, and for the Internet of Things and car electronics.

From AndeStar to RISC-V.

The shift that defines the company today came with RISC-V, an open instruction-set architecture that any company can implement. Chinese Wikipedia says Andes joined the RISC-V Foundation in 2016 as a founding member and became a premier member in 2020; the company calls itself a Founding and Premier Member of RISC-V International. In 2017, according to Chinese and English Wikipedia, it announced AndeStar V5, a new generation of its architecture built on RISC-V, while keeping features from V3 such as its custom-instruction framework.

That framework, Andes Custom Extension, lets a licensee add its own instructions to a core. The products are grouped in a family of names that all start the same way: AndeStar for the architecture, AndesCore for the processor cores, AndeShape for hardware platforms and AndeSight for the development environment, with AndeSoft software stacks alongside. The RISC-V cores come in numbered series, from small 32-bit cores to 64-bit, multi-core and vector designs; Chinese Wikipedia notes that the entry-level N22 core could be downloaded free under a scheme called RISC-V FreeStart. More recently the company has added AndesAIRE, a line of AI accelerators and neural-network software.

Andes also moved closer to its American customers. Its website says Andes Technology USA was set up in California in 2015, at the same time as the parent became a founding member of RISC-V, with an office in San Jose and, from June 2018, a research lab in Portland, Oregon. The company says that team developed the first RISC-V vector architecture, based on version 0.8 of the specification; we give that as its claim.

English Wikipedia counts more than 150 partners, among them the foundries TSMC, UMC and GlobalFoundries and the design-service firms Faraday and GUC. Chinese Wikipedia lists awards including a place on EE Times’ “Silicon 60” list of start-ups to watch in 2012 and a TSMC partner award in 2015.

Design and documentation.

Chip-design software and semiconductor IP are hard things to picture. The products are programs, licences and blocks of circuitry that customers place inside their own chips, so the companies that sell them have to borrow images from the work itself. The most common is the chip floor-plan: a die seen from above, its functional blocks lit in bright colour, or the stacked metal routing layers of a layout drawn as glowing lines on a dark ground.

Abstract circuit lines do much of the remaining work. Thin traces, right-angled paths and grids of contact points stand in for a product that no one can hold, and they travel easily from a website banner to a trade-show wall. Alongside them come pictures of people at work: engineers in front of multi-monitor layouts, waveforms and schematics on the screens, the design shown in progress rather than finished.

The trade has its own stages. The Design Automation Conference is where, according to English Wikipedia, Mentor Graphics introduced its first product in 1982, and booths there and at the RISC-V Summit carry the same chip renders, circuit patterns and demonstration screens. Keynote stages follow a familiar pattern too: a chief executive in front of a roadmap slide, with process nodes, product generations and partner names set out across the screen.

This guide looks past those shared images to what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it now, which tools or IP it is known for, and which events in its history — mergers, takeovers, export-control cases — shaped the name it trades under. Where a claim rests only on a company’s own word, we say so.

One prefix, many products.

Andes Technology remains an independent listed company in Hsinchu, trading on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. Its headquarters sit in Hsinchu City, and it lists offices and agents in other countries, with its North American base in San Jose. Frankwell Lin, who has led the company as president since 2006, has been its chairman and chief executive since 2021, the company says, and has sat on the board of RISC-V International since 2020.

Its brand is built less on a single product than on a naming system. Nearly every line begins with the same fragment — Ande or Andes — so that architecture, cores, platforms, tools and software read as parts of one kit: AndeStar, AndesCore, AndeShape and AndeSight. The core names follow a code of letters and numbers, in which the series number signals the class of design, and newer lines such as AndesAIRE keep the same prefix. For a licensor whose work ends up inside other companies’ chips, under other companies’ names, that consistency is the main way its own name stays visible to engineers.

The company describes its offer in the language of configurability: cores that customers can shape, extend with their own instructions and pair with software and tools from the same source. Its markets page lists uses from 5G and networking to cars, storage, wearables and AI, and English Wikipedia adds a longer list that runs from Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to SSD controllers and touch-screen chips. Andes publishes no colour code or typeface for its brand that we rely on here.

For a design guide, Andes Technology shows how an IP licensor can make one prefix carry a whole product family, and how a company built on its own architecture can move to an open standard without losing its name. Compare Arm, the British licensor of processor designs, and SiFive, another company built around RISC-V cores. For this guide we use navy, teal and silicon grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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