RISC-V has gone through 12 years without knowing it. From the beginning when it was questioned and not accepted by mainstream academic forums, the application scale in the IoT field has exceeded 10 billion. More and more institutions and enterprises have begun to enter RISC-V. V, Renesas Electronics, which ranks at the forefront of the world in terms of vehicle-grade MCU shipments, also began to deploy RISC-V two years ago.
At CITE 2022, which just ended in August, Leifeng.com and other media chatted with Renesas Electronics about the reasons behind the layout of RSIC-V and its future plans in the MCU field.
Xu Zheng, Senior Director, Industrial Automation Division, Renesas Electronics China
Renesas is not the active party in the development of MCUs with RISC-V cores.
“RISC-V is not our original plan, but a development based on customer needs. About two years ago, we began to consider what products the Chinese market would need when faced with future uncertainties, so we entered the RISC-V market. V core.” Tan Shaopeng, senior manager of Renesas Electronics China’s MCU business development department, told Leifeng.com.
Like X86 and Arm, RISC-V belongs to the CPU instruction set, but the RISC-V instruction set is open source and open. It is not owned by any company but belongs to all mankind. Therefore, when the ecological moat of X86 and Arm is almost unmatched RISC-V has given many CPU practitioners new hope. The original CPU ecological monopoly may not only be broken, but under the general trend of increasingly tense Sino-US relations, there are more possibilities for the independent control of domestic CPUs.
Because of this, many chip design manufacturers that originally used Arm cores began to walk on two legs, and used Arm cores and RISC-V cores to develop chips at the same time, so as to make arrangements in advance to deal with the occurrence of extreme situations.
Looking at the Chinese market, whether universities, scientific research institutions, or large companies such as Ali are actively participating in the ecological construction of RISC-V. The Chinese market voted for RISC-V with actions, so Renesas Electronics also made layout and planning in advance.
Renesas Electronics Xu Zheng also affirmed the diversity of market demand at this stage. “At the moment when the supply chain is tense, customers must choose the safest supplier, hoping to have more choices and choose the one with better price and quality. Now due to some geopolitical factors, many customers will think that the open source core is more reliable. Safety assurance, in the face of this challenge, we responded quickly and began to develop the RISC-V core.”
However, in terms of specific product strategies, Renesas Electronics is not fully sure about the market positioning of RISC-V core products. Provide customers with products in the form of Pin to Pin, the hardware is fully compatible, and the software can be replaced.
The earliest RISC-V-based MPU products launched by Renesas Electronics are mainly aimed at the industrial Internet terminal or gateway market.
“We will distribute the same hardware products to customers, and customers can choose whether they need RISC-V or Arm. Customers have more choices.” Xu Zheng said.
Although the RISC-V core is an alternative provided by Renesas Electronics to customers, in Renesas Electronics’ product planning, the product line focus of its own core, Arm core and RISC-V core is different.
For example, the private core of Renesas Electronics emphasizes high performance and high reliability. It can be optimized according to the specific application needs of customers, and it specializes in certain applications or markets. The RISC-V core will select some application markets with potential growth in the future.
Tan Shaopeng said that according to the judgment of the Chinese market demand, Renesas may release MPU chips for speech recognition based on RISC-V, and in the third and fourth quarters, it will also release RISC-V MCU products for motor control.
As for why voice and motor are chosen as the main track of RISC-V, Renesas Electronics also has its own judgment logic.
“Motors are a huge market in China, and all electrical appliances used in life are inseparable from the motor drive. No matter how the environment changes, this is a track where everyone will actively compete. In terms of voice control, in the era of the epidemic The development of human-computer interaction from touch to non-contact gesture control, to language or face recognition, how people accurately input commands to deal with machines is a track that we think can be developed.” Tan Shaopeng said.
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