Industry Expert Blogs

The Next SiFive Revolution

As SiFive announces its long-term plans to meet the rapidly changing needs of the automotive markets, this blog explores the many advantages the SiFive Automotive™ portfolio brings across a wide range of current and future applications, including; electrification, cockpit, ADAS, safety, and others. Our power efficient, flexible and high-performance cores are ideally suited for the most critical applications, and are of course, supported by the global RISC-V ecosystem.

Why SiFive?

Founded by the same engineers who invented the RISC-V ISA, SiFive is uniquely positioned to extend and broaden the reach of RISC-V based processors in new and growing markets. The rate of SiFive innovation and product development in the last few years has been astounding. SiFive has grown rapidly, and today offers not only the most comprehensive portfolio of RISC-V IP, but is rapidly approaching performance at the high-end that matches or exceeds any CPU IP vendor. SiFive’s growing portfolio of IP, ranging from small 32-bit real time CPUs all the way up to high-performance 64-bit application processors, singles out SiFive as the only RISC-V IP supplier that can cater to the entire spectrum of automotive compute requirements as a one stop shop. From our CEO, who grew Qualcomm’s automotive division, to our many automotive SOC experts, we are a team that uniquely understands the needs of today’s automotive manufacturer.

A Portfolio Approach

SiFive’s roadmap delivers a portfolio of products that meets the requirements of the vast majority of automotive CPU applications, including MCUs, MPUs and, soon, SoCs. We often read about macro trends in automotive electronic architecture design, including centralization of computing, increased compute at the sensing edge, increased SW complexity due to mixed criticality support, and a shift from domain to zonal controllers, to list but a few of today’s trends. The implications are a need for newer, more capable ECUs, and a higher degree of mixed criticality functional integration into fewer devices, at the price of increased software complexity. Despite the evolution in electronic architectures, the variety of automotive semiconductor products continues to remain broad, from small MCUs all the way to complex SoCs; however, there are significant commonalities across the many use cases including functional safety and security. Virtually every electronic device in a vehicle must comply with ISO26262, ISO21434, and additional local standards as applicable, such as UNECE WP.29 r155. SiFive Automotive products provide tailored levels of integrity, with area optimized products for both ASIL B and ASIL D, while in-field configurable integrity levels can be enabled through the available split-lock variants.

Click here to read more ...