Will RISC-V Reduce Auto MCU's Future Risk?
By going RISC-V, suppliers of automotive MCUs based on proprietary processor cores hope to avoid getting designed out by OEMs and excluded from the huge Chinese market.
Every tech reporter gets excited when he or she hears about new RISC-V developments in an MCU world where Arm continues to reign supreme.
Why?
Everybody loves a David vs Goliaths story. Who wouldn’t cheer for the dreamer of the impossible dream?
The RISC-V story has that emotional pull.
But the dramatic element is not entirely why I decided to write the following piece. The reporter in me wanted to know what prompted Infineon to switch horses midstream in its automotive MCU offerings — from its proprietary TriCore to RISC-V cores.
I wanted to hear from the horse’s mouth.
More importantly, I wanted a snapshot of the automotive MCU marketplace today. I wanted to know what other MCU suppliers are doing. I wanted a sense of the shifting wind. I needed to know whether this is a horse of a different color or just wishful thinking among RISC-V advocates.
We all know that there are billions of RISC-V cores already deployed but hidden in chips from Nvidia to Qualcomm.
Has there been any “industry-wide” progress in transitioning automotive MCUs to open ISA MCUs that might enable developers to write a variety of software?
Please click below to read my findings. I am grateful to the Yole Group’s commitment to independent journalism. Yole’s support allows me to choose the topics I want to investigate and provides me unfettered access to its team of analysts.