Renesas Electronics Corporation and SiFive, Inc., the industry leader in RISC-V processors and silicon solutions, announced a strategic partnership to develop next-generation, high-end RISC-V solutions for automotive applications. The partnership will also include SiFive licensing the use of their RISC-V core IP portfolio to Renesas.

RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles. The RISC-V ISA is provided under open source licenses that do not require fees to use. SiFive was founded by the inventors of RISC-V, who have been developing the RISC-V ISA since 2010.

SiFive innovation in microarchitecture design and configurability has created an industry-leading portfolio of RISC-V processor cores for domain-specific SoC design. SiFive Cores are the most silicon-deployed RISC‑V solutions in the world.

RISC-V is an important element in providing additional capabilities and options for new and existing. We are very excited to work with SiFive as their lead partner to develop next-generation semiconductor solutions through the collaboration of our accumulated expertise in the automotive field, and SiFive’s high-end RISC-V technologies.

—Takeshi Kataoka, Senior Vice President, General Manager of Automotive Solution Business Unit at Renesas

We are excited to collaborate with Renesas to develop next-generation automotive solutions powered by the SiFive Intelligence platform. Our roadmap of advanced, high-performance RISC-V processor cores and AI accelerators will deliver significant core performance increases with the capabilities needed to meet Automotive application requirements, along with enhanced AI capabilities to power scalable, workload-accelerated solutions.

—Patrick Little, Chairman and CEO, SiFive

Renesas provides automotive solutions including ADAS, Autonomous Driving (AD), Electric Vehicles (EV), and Connected Gateway (CoGW) to customers all over the world by utilizing its diverse portfolio of industry-leading microcontrollers (MCUs) and system-on-chips (SoCs), as well as analog and power products.

With a safe, comfortable, and environmentally-conscious society of future mobility in mind, Renesas is exploring the use of next-generation, high-performance RISC-V cores optimized for automotive applications to expand high-end SoC and MCU development capabilities to continue providing innovative and trusted automotive solutions to customers worldwide.

The SiFive Intelligence platform, based on SiFive RISC-V Vector processors with AI ISA extensions, features a differentiated software toolchain to enable the development of scalable solutions for AI and ML applications.

SiFive RISC-V processors are pre-integrated with advanced trace, debug, and security solutions compatible with industry tools to simplify heterogeneous integration and migration.