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 that allow hardware to move much faster,” SiFive VP of Product and Business Development Jack Kang told Product Design and Development. “At a highest level RISC-V represents a new way for hardware guys to think about how to do design.”
The partnership enables SiFive to bring its expertise with RISC-V to future CPUs from Microsemi. The first fruits of the partnership is HiFive Unleashed, a development board including SiFive’s RISC-V-based Freedom Unleashed platform and Microsemi’s PolarFire FPGAs.
“Our strategic relationship with SiFive is the latest demonstration of Microsemi’s continued leadership in driving the advancement of the RISC-V ecosystem,” said Jim Aralis, chief technology officer and vice president of advanced development at Microsemi, in a press release. “The powerful combination of PolarFire and Freedom Unleashed will further enable the development of RISC-V-based designs and, ultimately, extend the reach of custom silicon.”
Kang said that when the RISC-V foundation started, there were only 16 member companies. Over 100 attended in 2017. Members now include Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, Microsemi, and Western Digital.
“That rapid growth is one of the takeaways where RISC-V has achieved market acceptance. Now it is a question of which market will go first,” Kang said. “Whereas two years ago the question was: This is a nice product, this is a nice service, but will this become a thing?”
HiFive Unleashed will be the first RISC-V chip that can support Linux, supporting virtual memory, supervisor mode, and other features Linux requires.
SiFive describes it this way:
- “Engineers will be able to develop custom RISC-V designs by prototyping with the combination of the Freedom U500 SoC and PolarFire FPGA. Running at over , the Freedom U500 is the first Linux-capable, RISC-V based SoC in the market. The Freedom U500, designed in features the recently announced SiFive U54-MC RISC-V core complex, which includes five cache-coherent 64-bit CPU cores and a coherent L2 cache subsystem. The HiFive Unleashed development board enables easy software development with a wide variety of peripherals including DDR4, Gigabit Ethernet, PCIe, ChipLink.
- Microsemi’s PolarFire FPGAs are cost-optimized, lowest power, mid-range density devices making them ideal for developing a wide variety of RISC-V-based applications. The PolarFire FPGA will interface to the SiFive Freedom U500 via a ChipLink interconnect and a variety of additional peripherals will be supported.”
Kang said that this could put to rest the idea that the HiFive dev kit is only useful for small projects. HiFive Unleashed is expected to be available in Q1 2018 worldwide.
During the event SiFive also announced that it has joined the GlobalFoundries’ FDXcelerator Partner Program in order to create RISC-V CPU IP, namely SiFive’s E31 and E51 RISC-V cores available on GF’s 22FDX process technology.
“This is one level removed from embedded developers but it is a big milestone in enabling RISC-V on many more chips that will be available to developers,” Kang said.
The FDZcelerator matches partner companies with validated plug-and-play design solutions specific to 22FDX technology. The SiFive E31 chip is based on the RISC-V ISA and is suitable for high performance needs within strictly defined power and area requirements. The SiFive E51 chip is a 64-bit chip at 32-bit price, power, and area.
“As the RISC-V ecosystem continues to grow, SiFive’s leading CPU IP is seeing increased adoption. Our partnership with GF is going to enable an even larger pool of system designers to build on an industry-leading process platform,” said Sherwani. “SiFive has led the RISC-V ecosystem from early on and we are excited to continue extending RISC-V into new market segments.”
