Automotive Industry Charts New Course with RISC-V - EE Times

Abstract

The automotive industry is strategically shifting towards the open-standard RISC-V instruction set architecture, marking a pivotal moment in vehicle semiconductor design. This adoption is driven by the industry's need for deeper silicon customization, vertical integration, and greater control over critical supply chains, particularly for developing modern Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs). By leveraging RISC-V, manufacturers aim to reduce reliance on traditional proprietary IP vendors and accelerate innovation across safety-critical and high-performance computing applications within the car.

Report

Key Highlights

• Strategic Pivot: The automotive industry, including major OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, is actively integrating RISC-V into future semiconductor roadmaps, signaling a definitive move away from reliance on legacy proprietary architectures.
• Enabling SDVs: RISC-V's flexibility and customizability are viewed as essential prerequisites for the successful development and implementation of complex Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs).
• Control and Ownership: A primary driver for adoption is the desire for greater sovereignty over chip design, enabling manufacturers to customize the silicon for specific in-house needs and manage supply chain resilience.
• Diverse Applications: RISC-V cores are being targeted for a wide array of automotive functions, ranging from simple microcontrollers and sensor interfaces to high-performance AI accelerators and domain controllers.

Technical Details

• Functional Safety: A major technical focus is achieving stringent automotive functional safety standards, specifically compliance with ISO 26262 up to the highest safety integrity level, ASIL D.
• Customization via Extensions: The modular nature of RISC-V allows automotive architects to implement custom Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) extensions tailored for specific automotive workloads, such as efficient sensor fusion, vision processing, or encryption/security tasks.
• Heterogeneous Compute: RISC-V cores are commonly integrated into complex automotive System-on-Chips (SoCs) alongside other specialized IP (like GPUs or NPU accelerators) to manage scheduling, control, and general-purpose processing tasks efficiently.
• Reference Designs: Core IP vendors are actively pushing automotive-grade reference designs and verification IP to accelerate the development cycle for mission-critical applications.

Implications

• Ecosystem Validation: The adoption by the risk-averse, highly regulated automotive sector serves as a massive validation point for the maturity and robustness of the RISC-V architecture and its supporting ecosystem.
• Accelerated Tooling Investment: The high demand for ASIL-certified solutions will heavily drive investment and refinement in RISC-V development tools, compilers, verification suites, and real-time operating systems (RTOS) that meet industrial safety standards.
• Disruption of IP Licensing Models: The shift democratizes chip design, reducing the influence of proprietary IP licensing models and potentially lowering long-term silicon costs for automotive manufacturers.
• Innovation in Domain Specific Architectures: By granting deep control over the core instruction set, RISC-V enables the creation of highly optimized, domain-specific architectures that can deliver superior power efficiency and performance compared to general-purpose proprietary solutions.