Microsemi Opens RISC-V Ecosystem with Industry Leaders

Semiconductor solutions provider Microsemi Corp. has opened the Mi-V ecosystem, a program designed with industry leaders to enable open, low-power, programmable RISC-V solutions.

“As a leader in RISC-V, we are pleased Microsemi is the first tier one vendor to build out a complete open RISC-V ecosystem, which not only supports our needs, but contributes to the entire development community,” said Jim Aralis, chief technology officer and vice president of advanced development at Microsemi. “Customers can now select RISC-V for their new designs knowing a tier one vendor committed to the success of this technology is providing all the necessary tools to confidently use RISC-V soft CPUs in their products.”

RISC-V, an open instruction set architecture (ISA) under the governance of the RISC-V Foundation, offers numerous benefits including portability as well as enabling the open source community to test and improve cores at a faster pace than closed ISAs. As the RISC-V intellectual property (IP) core is not encrypted, it can be used to ensure trust and certifications not possible with closed architectures. Microsemi’s new Mi-V ecosystem brings together a number of industry leaders involved in the development of RISC-V to leverage their capabilities and streamline RISC-V designs for customers.

Microsemi’s Mi-V ecosystem, part of Microsemi’s Accelerate Ecosystem, contains a number of components. Design tools include Microsemi’s SoftConsole Eclipse-based integrated development environment, the firmware catalog and Libero PolarFire system-on-chip. Operating systems include Express Logic’s ThreadX, Huawei LiteOS and Micrium µC/OS-II. Boards include the RTG4 development kit, IGLOO 2 RISC-V board from Future Electronics, PolarFire Evaluation Kit and more. Debug dongles from Microsemi and Olimex, first-stage bootloaders and numerous soft peripherals are also included.

“Micrium is pleased to join Microsemi’s Mi-V ecosystem with our highly dependable uC/OS-II real-time kernel, a full-featured embedded operating system,” said Jean Labrosse, co-founder and chief architect at Micrium. “As RISC-V continues to grow in popularity, we look forward to working closely with Microsemi to support accelerated adoption of its RISC-V soft CPU product offerings as well as the entire ecosystem’s RISC-V advancements.”  

Microsemi offers a comprehensive portfolio of semiconductor and system solutions for aerospace & defense, communications, data center and industrial markets.