ALISO VIEJO, Calif.,
Oct. 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/
-- Microsemi Corporation (Nasdaq: MSCC), a leading
provider of semiconductor solutions differentiated by power,
security, reliability and performance, today announced the
company's new Mi-V™ ecosystem with industry leaders, to increase
adoption of its RISC-V soft central processing unit (CPU) product
family. The announcement comes as the company also introduces Mi-V
RV32IMA and additional field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based
soft CPU solutions ideally suited for designs utilizing RISC-V open
instruction set architectures (ISAs).
"As a leader in RISC-V, we are pleased Microsemi is the first
tier one vendor to build out a complete open RISC-V ecosystem,
which not only supports our needs, but contributes to the entire
development community," said Jim
Aralis, chief technology officer and vice president of
advanced development at Microsemi. "Customers can now select RISC-V
for their new designs knowing a tier one vendor committed to the
success of this technology is providing all the necessary tools to
confidently use RISC-V soft CPUs in their products."
RISC-V, an ISA which is a standard open architecture under the
governance of the RISC-V Foundation, offers numerous benefits,
including portability as well as enabling the open source community
to test and improve cores at a faster pace than closed ISAs. As the
RISC-V intellectual property (IP) core is not encrypted, it can be
used to ensure trust and certifications not possible with closed
architectures. Microsemi's new Mi-V ecosystem brings together a
number of industry leaders involved in the development of RISC-V to
leverage their capabilities and streamline RISC-V designs for
customers.
"Micrium is pleased to join Microsemi's Mi-V ecosystem with our
highly dependable µC/OS-II real-time kernel, a full-featured
embedded operating system," said Jean
Labrosse, co-founder and chief architect at Micrium. "As
RISC-V continues to grow in popularity, we look forward to working
closely with Microsemi to support accelerated adoption of its
RISC-V soft CPU product offerings as well as the entire ecosystem's
RISC-V advancements."
Microsemi's Mi-V ecosystem, part of Microsemi's Accelerate
Ecosystem, contains a number of components. Design tools include
Microsemi's SoftConsole Eclipse-based integrated development
environment (IDE), the firmware catalog and Libero PolarFire
system-on-chip (SoC). Operating systems include Express Logic's
ThreadX, Huawei LiteOS and Micrium µC/OS-II. Boards include the
RTG4™ development kit, IGLOO™2 RISC-V board from Future
Electronics, PolarFire Evaluation Kit and more. Debug dongles from
Microsemi and Olimex, first-stage bootloaders and numerous soft
peripherals are also included. Example projects, drivers and
firmware are all available on GitHub, the world's largest
repository of open source software.
Deployment of soft CPUs implemented with the R11C-V ISA is
automatic and delivered to the user's desktop via Microsemi's IP
Catalog. No end user license agreements are needed to gain access
to the soft CPUs. Using RISC-V soft CPUs within the Mi-V ecosystem
is simple, easy and free.
"Express Logic is pleased to be a foundational part of
Microsemi's Mi-V RISC-V ecosystem," said William E. Lamie, President, Express Logic. "Our
X-Ware Internet-of-Things (IoT) platform, including the
industry-leading ThreadX RTOS with over 6.2 billion deployments, is
the preferred embedded software platform for all designs requiring
industrial-grade run-time solutions—making us an ideal fit for this
new consortium."
Offering low power and an open architecture, Microsemi's
PolarFire™, RTG4™, SmartFusion™2 and IGLOO™2 field programmable
gate array (FPGA)-based RISC-V soft CPU cores are ideal for
developing a wide variety of applications within the aerospace and
defense, industrial and security markets. The Mi-V soft CPU cores
make them particularly suitable for applications including guided
munitions, IoT, secure communications and wireline bridging.
"The open source, royalty-free RISC-V instruction set creates a
new business model for CPU designers that is garnering increasing
interest and support," said Linley
Gwennap, principal analyst with The Linley Group,
which named the RISC-V ISA "Best Technology of 2016" at its
annual Analysts' Choice Awards in January
2017. "By introducing the RV32IM CPU core with support from
the Mi-V ecosystem, Microsemi will play an important role in
boosting the adoption of RISC-V."
Through Microsemi's early involvement in the creation of the
RISC-V Foundation, the company has an established leadership role
in the emerging standard and ecosystem and is working closely with
the nonprofit to ensure the ISA becomes an industry standard for a
wide variety of computing devices. Ted
Speers, head of product architecture and planning for
Microsemi's Programmable business unit, was appointed to the
inaugural board of directors of the RISC-V Foundation in
July 2016, and Ted Marena, director
of SoC FPGA marketing, was recently sworn in as chair of the RISC-V
Marketing Committee after serving as vice-chair since August 2016. Marena will also be the featured
speaker at EE World Online's upcoming webinar titled, "The RISC-V
ecosystem is ready for prime time. Get started here!" on
Oct. 25, 2017. Attendees can register
online to join this event.
The Mi-V Ecosystem began as part of the Microsemi Accelerate
Ecosystem, a program designed to reduce time to market for end
customers and time to revenue for ecosystem participants.
Microsemi's Accelerate Ecosystem brings together leading silicon,
intellectual property (IP), systems, software and design experts to
deliver solutions for end customers. Learn more at
http://www.microsemi.com/design-support/accelerate-ecosystem-partners.
About Microsemi's FPGAs
Microsemi's new cost-optimized
PolarFire FPGAs deliver the industry's lowest power at mid-range
densities with exceptional security and reliability. The product
family features 12.7 Gbps SerDes transceivers at up to 50 percent
lower power than competing FPGAs. With densities spanning from 100K
to 500K logic elements (LEs), the non-volatile PolarFire product
family consumes 10 times less static power than competitive devices
and features an even lower standby power referred to as
Flash*Freeze. The company's IGLOO™2 FPGAs and SmartFusion™2 SoC
FPGAs deliver more resources in low density devices, with the
lowest power, proven security and exceptional reliability. The
devices offer 30-50 percent more power efficiency and are ideal for
general purpose functions such as Gigabit Ethernet or dual PCI
Express control planes, bridging functions, input/output (I/O)
expansion and conversion, video/image processing, system management
and secure connectivity. Microsemi's RTG4 FPGAs bring new
capabilities to the market and combine a wealth of features with
the highest quality and reliability to meet the increasing demands
of modern satellite payloads. RTG4's reprogrammable flash
technology offers complete immunity to radiation-induced
configuration upsets in the harshest radiation environments,
without the configuration scrubbing required with SRAM FPGA
technology.
About Microsemi
Microsemi Corporation (Nasdaq: MSCC)
offers a comprehensive portfolio of semiconductor and system
solutions for aerospace & defense, communications, data center
and industrial markets. Products include high-performance and
radiation-hardened analog mixed-signal integrated circuits, FPGAs,
SoCs and ASICs; power management products; timing and
synchronization devices and precise time solutions, setting the
world's standard for time; voice processing devices; RF solutions;
discrete components; enterprise storage and communication
solutions, security technologies and scalable anti-tamper products;
Ethernet solutions; Power-over-Ethernet ICs and midspans; as well
as custom design capabilities and services. Microsemi is
headquartered in Aliso Viejo,
California and has approximately 4,800 employees globally.
Learn more at www.microsemi.com.
Microsemi and the Microsemi logo are registered trademarks or
service marks of Microsemi Corporation and/or its affiliates.
Third-party trademarks and service marks mentioned herein are the
property of their respective owners.
"Safe Harbor" Statement under the Private Securities Litigation
Reform Act of 1995: Any statements set forth in this news release
that are not entirely historical and factual in nature, including
statements related to the company's new Mi-V ecosystem with
industry leaders, to increase adoption of its RISC-V soft CPU
product family, and its potential effects on future business, are
forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are
based on our current expectations and are inherently subject to
risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ
materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements.
The potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited
to, such factors as rapidly changing technology and product
obsolescence, potential cost increases, variations in customer
order preferences, weakness or competitive pricing environment of
the marketplace, uncertain demand for and acceptance of the
company's products, adverse circumstances in any of our end
markets, results of in-process or planned development or marketing
and promotional campaigns, difficulties foreseeing future demand,
potential non-realization of expected orders or non-realization of
backlog, product returns, product liability, and other potential
unexpected business and economic conditions or adverse changes in
current or expected industry conditions, difficulties and costs of
protecting patents and other proprietary rights, inventory
obsolescence and difficulties regarding customer qualification of
products. In addition to these factors and any other factors
mentioned elsewhere in this news release, the reader should refer
as well to the factors, uncertainties or risks identified in the
company's most recent Form 10-K and all subsequent Form 10-Q
reports filed by Microsemi with the SEC. Additional risk factors
may be identified from time to time in Microsemi's future filings.
The forward-looking statements included in this release speak only
as of the date hereof, and Microsemi does not undertake any
obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect
subsequent events or circumstances.
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SOURCE Microsemi Corporation