RISC-V Pushes Into The Mainstream


RISC-V cores are beginning to show up in heterogeneous SoCs and packages, shifting from one-off standalone designs toward mainstream applications where they are used for everything from accelerators and extra processing cores to security applications. These changes are subtle but significant. They point to a growing acceptance that chips or chiplets based on an open-source instruction set ar... » read more

Adapting To Broad Shifts Essential In 2022


Change creates opportunity, but not every company is able to respond quickly enough to take advantage of those opportunities. Others may respond too quickly, before they properly understand the implications. At the start of a typical year, optimism is in plentiful supply. Any positive trend is seen as continuing, and any negative is seen as turning around. Normally the later in the year that... » read more

Extending RISC-V Processors In The Field With Codasip Studio & Menta eFPGA


RISC-V is an open specification that allows an infinite number of implementations. But RISC-V goes beyond that and encourages processor architects to add new instructions to accelerate certain algorithms or application domains, for example DSP, AI/ML, and others, while keeping the base instruction set stable. The new instructions may help with the performance, code size, power consumption, or d... » read more

RISC-V decoupled Vector Processing Unit (VPU) For HPC


A technical paper titled "Vitruvius+: An Area-Efficient RISC-V Decoupled Vector Coprocessor for High Performance Computing Applications" was published by researchers at Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain. "The maturity level of RISC-V and the availability of domain-specific instruction set extensions, like vector processing, make RISC-V a good candidate for supporting the integration of ... » read more

Efficient Trace In RISC-V


Systems with RISC-V cores often include multiple types of other processors and accelerators. Peter Shields, product manager for Tessent at Siemens Digital Industries Software, talks about what's needed for debug and trace in context, including the need for unobtrusive observation at full speed, what to trace and when to trace it, and how embedded IP can identify to report which branches are tak... » read more

Step Towards A 5G Software-Defined RAN Over A Fully Open-Source Parallel RISC-V Architecture (ETH Zurich)


A technical paper titled "Efficient Parallelization of 5G-PUSCH on a Scalable RISC-V Many-core Processor" was published by researchers at ETH Zurich. Abstract (partial) "5G Radio access network disaggregation and softwarization pose challenges in terms of computational performance to the processing units. At the physical layer level, the baseband processing computational effort is typicall... » read more

Heterogeneous Ultra-Low-Power RISC-V SoC Running Linux


A technical paper titled "HULK-V: a Heterogeneous Ultra-low-power Linux capable RISC-V SoC" was published by researchers at University of Bologna, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, and ETH Zurich. "We present HULK-V: an open-source Heterogeneous Linux-capable RISC-V-based SoC coupling a 64-bit RISC-V processor with an 8-core Programmable Multi-Core Accelerator (PMCA), delivering up to... » read more

Manage Your Risk In RISC-V


Adoption of RISC-V processors is accelerating. This technology, like everything, comes with benefits and risks. The open standard means freedom for many developers, but success depends on the development of a support ecosystem around RISC-V. Industry collaboration is making broad adoption of RISC-V possible, and one example is the introduction of efficient trace for RISC-V cores. When incorp... » read more

Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI) For Verification, With Better Memory Safety (Oxford)


A technical paper titled "A Formal CHERI-C Semantics for Verification" was published by researchers at University of Oxford. Abstract: "CHERI-C extends the C programming language by adding hardware capabilities, ensuring a certain degree of memory safety while remaining efficient. Capabilities can also be employed for higher-level security measures, such as software compartmentalization, ... » read more

Improving Concurrent Chip Design, Manufacturing, And Test Flows


Semiconductor design, manufacturing, and test are becoming much more tightly integrated as the chip industry seeks to optimize designs using fewer engineers, setting the stage for greater efficiencies and potentially lower chip costs without just relying on economies of scale. The glue between these various processes is data, and the chip industry is working to weave together various steps t... » read more

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