configurable processors

This week’s RISC-V Summit in California has seen an expansion to the open-source portfolio being built around the architecture as well as increased support from software vendors such as Wind River.

Arm has relented on its opposition to custom instructions with the decision to let customers add them to V8-M processors.

Andes and SiFive attempt to lower the barriers to entry for SoC designs based on RISC-V processor cores.

Codasip has launched the seventh generation of its Studio software for processor design and tuning, aiming to take advantage of the interest in RISC-V as a core instruction set for customized processors.

The RISC-V workshop in California at the end of November 2017 provided the opportunity for Western Digital to commit its own work on processors for internal use to the open-source architecture and for the ecosystem of off-the-shelf cores and tools to expand.

“It’s the time between putting out an open-source ARM core and getting a letter from an ARM lawyer,” says UC Berkeley professor Krste Asanovic. So, some design teams are turning to IP that started out as open source to provide more scope for experimentation.

Memory efficiency has driven the design of the latest video and image processor core developed by Cadence Tensilica.

Altera has agreed to Intel's offer to buy the company, with FPGAs to be integrated into Xeon processors after 2016. Atoms will join programmable logic in IoT-oriented devices.

Cadence Design Systems has launched the 11th generation of Tensilica Xtensa customizable processors, with changes for VLIW, power-saving caches and memory accesses.

Synopsys has developed a digital signal processing (DSP) instruction set extension to its EM family and two cores that employ it.