Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, had already stated in an interview with Markt&Technik in the summer of this year that RISC-V is definitely no longer perceived as a hobbyist architecture. Activities by semiconductor manufacturers confirm her statement.

The first company to come to market with a general-purpose 32-bit microcontroller based on the RISC-V core was GigaDevice Semiconductor, with its GD32VF103 MCU series in 2019 – this product won the title of the best hardware product of the year at embedded world 2020.

GigaDevice Semiconductor

Eric Jin, Product Marketing Director at GigaDevice, explains that this MCU is designed for mainstream development needs and “provides a cost-effective solution for developers who need an open-source processor core, in this case the RISC-V.” With the GD32VF103 series, GigaDevice is targeting embedded applications in the fields of industrial control, consumer electronics, IoT, edge computing, artificial intelligence and deep learning.

The company, of course, also maintains its Arm-based controllers. The majority of its microcontrollers are based on Arm processor cores – developments with these architectures also continue. But Jin also emphasizes that GigaDevice will continue its developments of general-purpose RISC-V MCUs. Specifically, GigaDevice plans to launch its next GD32 RISC-V MCUs as early as next year.

Eric Jin says, “GigaDevice is a strategic member of the RISC-V Foundation and continues to promote RISC-V technology at industry events and seminars around the world, for example at the RISC-V Summit in China, Japan, the U.S. and many other industry events, including embedded world and electronica.” And with a view to the ecosystem that is crucial for all controllers, he explains: “There are several industry-leading ecosystem partners around the world that are actively involved with GD32 MCUs. They provide evaluation tools including IDEs, debuggers, development kits and embedded software, such as IAR, Segger, Ashling, Embeetle, Seeed, development boards and many others.”

Microchip Technology

Tim Morin, Technical Fellow at Microchip Technology, also sees Microchip in a pioneering role. He says the company attended the 2nd RISC-V Workshop in Berkeley back in 2015: “We immediately recognized the technological innovation that RISC-V offers, and we also recognized that RISC-V is also an innovator on the business side.” Accordingly, the company (at that time Microsemi) began developing numerous soft IP cores for its proprietary FPGAs. Then the company introduced the first standard products with RISC-V cores for the broader market: the PolarFire SoCs with a hardened RISC-V-based complete microprocessor subsystem. Tim Morin is convinced that there are now no regional or application-specific differences with regard to acceptance.

Nvidia

Nvidia was known to want to acquire Arm; however, this year the acquisition was called off because the regulatory difficulties were simply too great. Nonetheless, the company is quite active in the RISC-V space, and has been for a very long time. Mark Overby, Chief Platform and Security Architect at Nvidia, emphasizes: “Nvidia has been involved with the RISC-V architecture for many years. We presented some of our early efforts in this area at the 4th Annual RISC-V Workshop in 2016. Today, we use embedded processing elements in our automotive SoCs that are compliant with Arm, RISC-V and proprietary instruction set architectures.” Nvidia has also participated in the Security Committee to make designs more secure, run attack simulation scenarios, and share lessons learned with the community to improve resilience for all use cases.

At Nvidia, according to Mark Overby, it’s not a matter of choosing between Arm and RISC-V; rather, the company is focused on optimizing embedded processing elements according to the different workloads. Overby says: “This could include an element that manages the power supply, boot process, audio or other functions. For automotive SoCs, this could mean using a mix of instruction set architectures.” Commenting on the extent to which there are acceptance differences, Overby says: “The computing elements embedded in our automotive SoCs are typically not accessible to the customer, and accordingly the instruction set architecture used doesn’t matter to the customer base.”

Renesas Electronics

Renesas Electronics is also one of the RISCV supporters, and the company’s recent announcements make that abundantly clear. Bernd Westhoff, Director of IoT Product Marketing in Renesas Electronics’ IoT & Infrastructure Business Unit, explains the following from an MCU perspective: “Renesas is committed to playing a leading role in the MCU world with a multi-architecture portfolio. This includes the continuous expansion of our roadmap based on Arm and Renesas proprietary cores, such as RX and RL78. The addition of RISC-V architecture will further strengthen our offering by providing innovative solutions for future application-specific standard products.

With the RISC-V-based ASSP for motor control applications, Renesas and its partners enable customers to benefit from a ready-to-use solution.” However, Renesas is not only active in the MCU sector with RISC-V; the company also relies on ISA in the MPU segment. In this context, Johannes Brücker, Business Development Manager RZ MPU in Renesas Electronics’ IoT & Infrastructure Business Unit, refers to the RZ/Five components, entry-level 64-bit general-purpose variants equipped with the CPU IP core from Andes – the core is with the RISC-V open-source architecture ISAcompatible. Brücker also emphasizes that the RISC-V MPUs increase customer choice, thus giving them more flexibility in product development. The company has even made sure that former Arm users can switch to RISC-V. In this respect, Brücker explains, “To make the migration from Arm as easy as possible, RZ/Five is pin-compatible with RZ/G2UL Type 1 for Linux and RZ/A3UL for RTOS.”

Regionally, according to Bernd Westhoff and Johannes Brücker, Asian customers in particular are currently very interested in the RISC-V products. Westhoff adds that there are currently only a few commercially viable RISC-V products on the MCU market. Westhoff continues, “With regard to our ASSP launched in September, we are seeing a positive response in the Chinese market and growing interest in other Asian regions. At electronica, we are presenting our RISC-V ASSP solution to determine potential interest from other regions.” And Brücker notes that for the RZ/Five MPUs optimized for IoT edge devices, the main interest is also coming from China and other Asian regions. Here, demand would be driven by geopolitical risks, but there is also increasing interest from European customers. “This is about customers preferring an open-architecture CPU because they are concerned about the long-term use of Arm.” Renesas is convinced of the RISC-V approach, which is why Brücker concludes by adding: “RZ/Five is part of our RZ/G series of general-purpose MPUs. Thanks to Andes high-performance IP core, the AX45MP, entry-level AI/ML applications are possible.” In a next step, Renesas will expand the general-purpose lineup with additional RISC-V MPUs. Whether Renesas will add RISC-V devices to its dedicated RZ/V MPU series for AI applications is under consideration.

Infineon Technologies

Infineon Technologies has been a bit hesitant so far when it comes to RISC-V. According to Steve Tateosian, Vice President of the IoT, Compute & Wireless Business Unit at Infineon Technologies, Infineon is currently continuing to evaluate market and customer acceptance, plus software development options for products that can incorporate one or more RISC-V core(s). Whereby, he notes that RISC-V has the potential to play a role in the various categories, ranging from general-purpose components and more application-optimized MCUs/MPUs to RISC-V as an additional processor in the device.

Tateosian continues, “The market is moving in this direction that all of the above mentioned scenarios are covered, including deeply embedded versions of RISC-V that customers may not have direct visibility or access to.” In his view, the greatest interest and apparently also the most available options come from China and Taiwan.