This article discusses Foundries.io‘s microPlatforms which support Intel, Arm, and RISC-V architectures and are designed to avoid lock-in to specific hardware implementations.
Ecosystems can bring members a wide variety of benefits. Enabling these benefits to be collectively used, whilst enabling differentiated offerings, requires some key elements to be considered:
- Avoid duplication of effort, especially in low differentiating features
- Adopt the technologies that bring solutions to market
- Reuse and build on the ecosystems’ collective knowledge
As the range of RISC-V hardware designs reaches the market the next challenge is managing the software ecosystem. Software fragmentation is a risk that underlies any hardware architecture that has multiple implementations, from multiple vendors. The ability to leverage consistency across the community whilst remaining flexible to differentiation is core to the mission RISC-V has. We need to look at the key areas that are consistent to all and offer software structures that can flex with the underlying hardware implementation and evolution. Open source solutions need to take this into consideration when designing supporting toolchains and APIs.
To read more, please visit: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/industry-articles/utilizing-the-risc-v-ecosystem-in-zephyr-and-linux-microplatforms/.