Qualcomm has announced a RISC-V-based wearable solution, leveraging the open-source chip design for Wear OS by Google.

RISC-V is the open-source competitor to Arm’s semiconductor designs, giving companies an alternative to paying Arm’s licensing fees. Companies have increasingly been looking at RISC-V as an option for smartphones, tablets, and computers.

Qualcomm is wasting no time pushing RISC-V adoption, working with Google to leverage the chip designs for Google’s Wear OS platform.

“Qualcomm Technologies have been a pillar of the Wear OS ecosystem, providing high performance, low power systems for many of our OEM partners,” said Bjorn Kilburn, GM of Wear OS by Google. “We are excited to extend our work with Qualcomm Technologies and bring a RISC-V wearable solution to market.”

“We are excited to leverage RISC-V and expand our Snapdragon Wear platform as a leading silicon provider for Wear OS. Our Snapdragon Wear platform innovations will help the Wear OS ecosystem rapidly evolve and streamline new device launches globally,” said Dino Bekis, vice president and general manager, Wearables and Mixed Signal Solutions, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Qualcomm outlined the benefits Google and other companies will gain by using RISC-V:

As an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA), RISC-V encourages innovation by allowing any company to develop completely custom cores. This allows more companies to enter the marketplace, which creates increased innovation and competition. RISC-V’s openness, flexibility, and scalability benefits the entire value chain – from silicon vendors to OEMs, end devices, and consumers.

Qualcomm and Google’s investment and adoption of the architecture is sure to help speed up its adoption.