Microchip Launches Industry’s First SoC FPGA Development Kit Based on the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture

The rising adoption of the free and open RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) is driving the need for an affordable, standardized development platform that embeds RISC-V technology and leverages the diverse RISC-V ecosystem. To meet this need, Microchip Technology is offering the industry’s first RISC-V based System-on-Chip (SoC) Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) development kit for its own low-power, low-cost, PolarFire SoC FPGA.

Microchip Technology is determined to meet the growing need for power-efficient inferencing in edge applications by making it easier for software developers to implement their algorithms in PolarFire field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). As a significant addition to its solutions portfolio in this segment, Microchip’s VectorBlox Accelerator Software Development Kit (SDK) helps developers take advantage of Microchip’s PolarFire FPGAs for creating low-power, flexible overlay-based neural network applications without learning an FPGA tool flow.

Microchip Technology, via its Microsemi Corporation subsidiary, extended its Mi-V ecosystem by unveiling the architecture for a new class of SoC FPGAs that combine the industry's lowest power mid-range PolarFire FPGA family with a complete microprocessor subsystem based on the open, royalty-free RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). Demonstrations took place during RISC-V Summit (Dec. 4-5) to show size, power and performance benefits of integrating PolarFire SoC's Hard CPU Subsystem with Programmable Logic.