Electronic Design Article: Hard-Core RISC-V Cores Mate With FPGA

By integrating hard-core RISC-V CPUs with its latest FPGAs, Microsemi, a Microchip company, has further bolstered its RISC-V support. This is the same approach that Intel/Altera and Xilinx have done with Arm cores and their system-on-chip (SoC) FPGA offerings. Microsemi also has an FPGA with a hard-core ARM Cortex-M3, but its Mi-V initiative has been pushing soft-core RISC-V support in its FPGA lines.
Microsemi’s 64-bit RISC-V SoC FPGA is based on its PolarFire FPGA. The approach has a number of advantages, including a simplified design that’s easier to secure. The design is immune to Spectre- and Meltdown-style attacks. The company has also included anti-tamper support, differential-power-analysis (DPA) resistant bitstream programming, cryptographic bound supply-chain assurance, physically unclonable function (PUF) support, a side-channel resistant crypto coprocessor, and a true random number generator. In addition, all memory has single-error-correction, double-error-detection (SECDED) support.
The RISC-V approach also provides a lower-cost migration path to an ASIC for those designs that are more geared to high volumes. The kicker is that these cores can be configured to provide deterministic operation.
 
To read more, please visit: https://www.electronicdesign.com/industrial-automation/hard-core-risc-v-cores-mate-fpga.