Article By : Anders Holmberg
Embedded developers need the right tools to optimize RISC-V’s advantages.
The SiFive RISC-V Automotive CPU IP continues to advance to address and enable automotive applications like infotainment, connectivity and advanced driver-assistance systems. Yet without the right tools, embedded software developers at OEMS and suppliers cannot make full use of the energy efficiency, simplicity, security and flexibility that RISC-V offers.
Formal standards for safety certification have been around for many years, but over the last few years, the interest in and use of such standards has risen quite dramatically. Within automotive systems, the sector-specific standard ISO 26262 is used. Getting your application functional safety (FuSa)-certified is just a fact of life in the automotive industry. However, this process is not full-fledged in the RISC-V toolchain ecosystem, with many players coming from the broad market missing the embedded expertise in safety applications.
From one front, the RISC-V automotive cores are designed for automotive functional safety to prevent systematic failures as well as random hardware failures. And from the other front, embedded developers that are about to start a project with safety-critical functionality or functional safety requirements are aware that the tools they use must be somehow qualified as suitable for safety-related development. What does that mean for embedded developers?
Going through all the processes and testing necessary to complete the functional safety checklist has traditionally been a very difficult process. In addition, high-integrity standards require developers to provide extensive justification for selecting a particular development tool, unless the tool is already certified. The proof of compliance for the tools increases the cost and time of development.
Validating their own toolchain for functional safety is expensive and time-consuming. Tool certifications can take up to 12 months and occupy several employees full-time.
Additionally, today’s development practices require automated processes to ensure quality and to run builds and tests continuously in scalable and cross-platform build-server topologies. Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines are being used everywhere. These modern workflows for CI and CD enable companies to automatically provision build and test environments, as well as dynamically deploy releases into production.
A certified cross-platform build toolchain (Ubuntu, Red Hat and Windows) enables embedded developers to use it in their safety-related projects with minimal fuss. Selecting a tool with appropriate services included protects the tool selection and the investment from day one.
Embedded developers can accelerate time to market with pre-certified development tools for RISC-V cores by shortening the rigorous certification process. The combined solution and expertise of the automotive cores and pre-certified development tools (40+ years of experience in embedded) provide the best performance and safety for automotive applications, even in cross-platform scenarios. Functional safety is undoubtedly one of the most important features in many embedded systems, and companies must consider development tools as an integral part of system certification.
IAR and SiFive have a strong partnership and stand out in the RISC-V ecosystem to further advance the success of RISC-V technology in the automotive industry. SiFive is a leader in commercial RISC-V core IP, and the IAR toolchain is the most widely used solution for building embedded applications.
From the IAR side, we aim to drive change in the industry by supporting the automotive supply chain supporting the ISO 26262 FuSa-certified RISC-V cores, including the long-term RISC-V roadmap from SiFive as well as customers with professional FuSa-certified development tools.
This article was originally published on EE Times.
Anders Holmberg is the chief technology officer at IAR Systems.
