RISC-V Automotive Readiness to be Debated at Embedded World
RISC-V International announced it will host a panel discussion at the upcoming embedded world 2026 conference focused on the architecture's readiness for the automotive sector. The panel will cover topics including safety, security, AI, and Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS). This signals the open-source instruction set's growing consideration for use in safety-critical applications.
- Multiple RISC-V IP vendors have achieved ISO 26262 functional safety certification, a critical standard for automotive systems. Andes Technology was the first to have its development process certified up to ASIL D, the highest level, and companies like Codasip and SiFive now offer pre-certified processor cores such as the Codasip L739 (ASIL-D) and the SiFive E6-A series (ASIL B to D). - The open-source nature of the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) allows for customization, enabling designers to add specific instructions to accelerate AI and machine learning workloads for ADAS without paying licensing or royalty fees associated with proprietary architectures like ARM. - Major automotive industry players are backing RISC-V; Qualcomm, NXP, Infineon, and Bosch have formed Quintauris, a joint venture to advance the adoption of RISC-V by focusing on initial applications in the automotive sector. - The market for automotive-grade RISC-V CPUs is projected to grow significantly, with one forecast estimating an increase from 20 million units in 2023 to approximately 100 million units by 2028. - The shift toward software-defined vehicles (SDVs) and zonal architectures benefits from RISC-V's scalability, allowing a single, unified architecture to be used for various in-vehicle applications, from simple microcontrollers to high-performance compute for ADAS. - While adoption is growing, the RISC-V ecosystem of development tools, software libraries, and middleware is still less mature than that of established players like ARM, which can present integration and development challenges. - Companies are launching RISC-V cores specifically for automotive AI; MIPS, for example, has released the P8700 CPU, which features multi-threading and is designed to efficiently process data from multiple sensors for L2+ ADAS systems. - The embedded world conference has featured a dedicated RISC-V track in prior years, with presentations from companies like Microchip and Quintauris on topics such as porting software and optimizing RISC-V with extensions for real-time automotive applications.
