First RISC-V-based SoC FPGA enters mass production

Article by: Microchip Technology Inc.

The first programmable gate array (FPGA) SoC supporting the royalty-free RISC-V open instruction set architecture (ISA) has entered mass production, marking a major milestone in the evolution of embedded processors. As Customers Continue to Adopt PolarFire SoC FPGAs At a rapid pace, Microchip Technology Inc. is announcing production qualification for the MPFS250T and the previously announced MPFS025T. Microchip’s Mi-V ecosystem has also continued to streamline the adoption of RISC-V while enabling a new class of industrial, IoT and other advanced products that are smaller, more energy efficient and less expensive.

“We now have a wide range of customers who have designed into the PolarFire SoC family with our suite of Mi-V tools and solutions,” said Shakeel Peera, vice president of marketing for Microchip’s FPGA business unit. “These customers have developed innovative products that bring the best solutions to the market with superior thermal and energy efficiency, as well as unprecedented computing capacity in small formats. We are now writing a new chapter in the RISC-V story with the availability of production-qualified PolarFire SoC devices.

PolarFire SoC FPGAs unlock new configurable processing opportunities with their hardened, Linux-compatible real-time RISC-V microprocessor subsystem on a fast FPGA fabric, backed by Microchip’s commitment to a product roadmap and long-term availability. They also take advantage of customizations enabled by the RISC-V ISA open standard to improve power efficiency, security, and reliability over other processing options, while introducing valuable new features such as asymmetric multiprocessing deterministic mode. (AMP) allowing users to run a Linux OS while running a real-time application at maximum performance. PolarFire SoC innovation enables new solutions to challenges such as improving computing power efficiency and accelerating computation at the network edge and providing unparalleled capabilities for communication applications, defence, medical and industrial automation.

The Mi-V ecosystem is equally important for RISC-V adoption, spanning a full variety of IPs, hardware, operating systems, middleware, debuggers, compilers, and design services. More than two dozen partners work with Microchip to continuously develop this low-cost evaluation platform and accelerate design deployment in a variety of industries. It removes barriers to entry, allowing embedded engineers, software designers, and hardware developers to take advantage of the benefits of RISC-V ISA and the PolarFire SoC FPGA’s combination of small form factors, efficiency thermal and low power consumption.

“Microchip’s PolarFire SoC FPGA and Mi-V ecosystem provide an excellent platform for evaluating a Linux-compatible RISC-V-based multi-core SoC,” said Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International. “The market now has a production-qualified RISC-V solution to source and adopt in their designs. The FPGA framework is an innovative platform that enables hardware acceleration for system design. »

Microchip’s PolarFire SoC FPGAs include a combination of mid-range transceivers, logic resources, digital signal processing (DSP), and random access memory (RAM) and are ideal for safety-critical applications in due to their immunity to Single Event Upset (SEU) issues and inclusion of Single Error Correction Double Error Detection (SECDED) for all memories. They enable highly integrated designs and are twice as energy efficient per watt as competitive devices. Power and thermal efficiency eliminates the cost and complexity of active cooling, fans, or heatsinks, enabling applications that demand thermal efficiency along with higher levels of integration, defense-grade security, and reliability.

Production qualification for Microchip MPFS250T, and the previously announced MPFS025T, expands the PolarFire SoC portfolio of multi-core RISC-V SoC FPGAs, delivering an even smaller thermal footprint for low-power smart embedded vision applications and automotive, l automation, communications, defense systems and IoT where power and performance cannot be compromised. The MPFS250T and MPFS025T are available for purchase now.