Ballast, the first multicore RISC-V System on Chip (SoC) developed by the SoC Hub led by Nokia and Tampere University, has taped out in a 22nm TSMC process.
The Finnish SoC Hub consortium has taped out its first system on chip design for IoT and Edge AI applications.
The Ballast chip is the first in a series of three chips to be manufactured by TSMC in a 22nm Ultra Low Leakage process for IoT and Edge applications. Ballast contains several different RISC-V CPU cores, a Digital Signal Processor, AI accelerator, sensor-like interfaces and an extension interface to FPGA. A full software stack – including drivers, software development tools and chip debugging support – has also been implemented and the chip supports both real-time operating systems and Linux simultaneously.