RISC-V Ecosystem News

SiFive, developer of the RISC-V based Freedom Unleashed (U500) platform, has partnered with Microsemi to build a development board featuring Microsemi’s PolarFire FPGAs. The deal was announced at the RISC-V Workshop hosted by Western Digital, Nov. 28 – 30. “[This collaboration] represents to me a movement of ways of thinking about how we’re going to build design, how we’re going to do hardware in much more collaborative ways and ways…

RISC-V is on the rise, as highlighted by the RISC-V Workshop. Multicore, 64-bit versions of RISC-V are available, and there’s support for FPGA and eFPGA versions. I’ve been following the RISC-V movement almost since its inception, and had a chance to try out SiFive’s Arduino-compatible HiFive1 board earlier. It contains a 32-bit, SiFive E310 RISC-V-compatible processor. I say compatible because RISC-V defines an instruction set architecture (ISA), not a processor architecture like one of the Arm Cortex-M architectures….

In addition to embOS, SEGGER offers emWin to construct user interfaces, emFile file system, emSSL, emSSH and emSecure to secure internet communications, cryptographic and security libraries for encryption, code signing and authentication (digital signatures), embOS/IP, emModbus, emUSB-Host and emUSB-Device communication stacks for Internet and industrial applications, and emLoad to enable firmware updates from portable storage or delivered over the air.https://www.segger.com/news/segger-presents-rtos-stacks-middleware-for-risc-v/

Last week, the RISC-V Foundation held a workshop in Silicon Valley. The purpose was to update developers on the progress of the technology and also let some of the partners talk about their own developments/products. By most measures, the workshop was deemed a success. I spoke to Rick O’Connor, the Executive Director of the RISC-V Foundation in this week’s Five Minutes with…discussion to see if he agreed. Rick also went…

Many (likely most) of you have not heard of RISC-V. It’s a new instruction set intellectual property  (IP) that is open sourced and offers an alternative to licensed IP from Arm and MIPS. As instruction sets go, RISC-V is relatively new, having just exited the University of California, Berkeley and entered the market in 2014 and is now managed by the RISC-V Foundation. But in those last 3 years, the…

RISC-V, the open-source computer core architecture, will be getting a big push from Western Digital in the coming years as the company has pledged to transitioning its own consumption of processors to RISC-V. According to the company Western Digital ships over one billion cores per year, and plans to double that number. And if all goes according to plan, they will all be based on RISC-V.To read more, please visit: https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/western-digital-transitions-risc-v-open-source-architecture-big-data-iot/96736693957917

Andes Technology Corporation (TWSE: 6533), the leading Asia-based supplier of compact, low-power, high-performance 32/64-bit embedded CPU cores and a founding member of RISC-V Foundation, today announces the partnership with the world-class tools vendors including Imperas, Lauterbach, Mentor, a Siemens Business, and UltraSoC (in alphabetical order) to bring their system-on-chip (SoC) development environments to Andes V5 processors and the RISC-V community.http://www.andestech.com/news-d.php?cls=1&id=475

UltraSoC today announced that Microsemi, a leading provider of semiconductor solutions differentiated by power, security, reliability and performance, has licensed UltraSoC’s universal analytics and embedded intelligence platform for use in an expanding range of Microsemi products based on the RISC-V open source processor architecture.https://www.ultrasoc.com/ultrasoc-selected-by-microsemi-for-growing-risc-v-product-range/#more-2741

Intrinsix Corp., an advanced semiconductor design services firm, announced that its security and cryptographic subsystem IP has been selected by DARPA for implementation into the DARPA CHIPS program. Intrinsix will create a security chiplet based on their IP.  The subsystem IP is also being used as a security solution for commercial applications such as the Internet-of-Things, smart sensors and other connected appliances.https://www.intrinsix.com/blog/intrinsix-cryptographic-ip-selected-by-darpa-for-use-in-chips-program-featuring-risc-v-security-processor