Firms partner to enable adoption of RISC-V for automotive design

SoC.one Inc and Imagination Technologies has reached a strategic alliance to accelerate the adoption of RISC-V in the automotive design cycle. Electrification is changing how cars are architected and built.  ‘Software-defined vehicles’ open new opportunities to redefine and package transportation and mobility as services.  It also presents enormous challenges in the design, verification, and production of connected autonomous vehicles.

The RISC-V open instruction set architecture (ISA) is well positioned for the automotive market.  The served addressable market (SAM) for RISC-V in automotive was 4 million cores in 2020, forecast to rise to 150 million cores in 2022, and to 2.9 billion cores by 2025 (source: Deloitte).  However, uncertainties around maturity, performance, and security compared to more established automotive ISA have delayed adoption.  The strategic partnership between SoC.one and Imagination Technologies aims to address those concerns and position RISC-V as a mainstream, high-performance, secured compute platform for the automotive industry.

Source: Imagination Technologies

SoC.one Cloud is an end-to-end, close-loop, mixed-reality platform that powers the needs of automotive OEMs and suppliers to explore, design, build and train / validate compute solutions critical to the future of the connected and autonomous driving cars.  The SoC.one complete ‘Digital Twins’ approach offers a near real-time, realistic, and repeatable setting, needed to create automotive products that perform well in the stochastic and diverse real world.

Crucial component for automotive build process & development

“The ability to see a design from the immersive experience of the vehicles, occupants, pedestrians, motorbikes and other objects on the road offers OEMs insight and understanding that can minimize risks, improve development time, and increase safety,” said Krishna Raghavan, founder of SoC.one.  Raghavan also added that “From integration and training for auto-pilot systems, to the fusion of in-vehicle control and infotainment, and integration with automotive edge and cloud data services, the capabilities of SoC.one Cloud will prove to be crucial component of any automotive company’s process and development portfolio.”

“With our longstanding track record of delivery into automotive and our diverse IP offerings, Imagination’s GPU, AI, ethernet and RISC-V CPU cores are ideal for automotive grade, safety-critical applications.  An integration of these IPs into SoC.one mix-reality cloud enables the designers to continuously characterize, validate, and develop software for automotive use-cases.  We are delighted to be partnering with SoC.one to enable the next evolution of RISC-V automotive design,” said Shreyas Derashri, vice-president of compute at Imagination

Automotive devices-under-x extends from onboard elements (sensors, cameras, ECUs, compute solutions) to infrastructure elements (traffic lights, smart signs, wireless communication) and vehicles (cars, trucks, motorcycles), all utilizing IPs from Imagination Technologies.   SoC.one Cloud provides the means for developers and software systems to interact with the device-under-x in a close-loop context.  Simulation helps the designers understand how an automotive product or device may ultimately function.  SoC.one extends this capability to all phases of the product design and development, from conceptualization to stages of implementation and deployment.