Microchip Adds Second Development Tool Offering for Designers Using Its Low-Power PolarFire® RISC-V® SoC FPGA

Microchip Technology (Nasdaq: MCHP) today announced the second development tool offering in its Smart Embedded Vision initiative for designers using its PolarFire RISC-V System on Chip (SoC) Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The industry’s lowest-power SoC FPGA in its class, the PolarFire device is the only mid-range device of its kind that simultaneously supports dual 4K video processing and quad core RISC-V application-class processors running both the Real Time Operating System (RTOS) and rich operating systems like Linux®.

Microchip’s Smart Embedded Vision development platform joins the company’s previously announced VectorBlox™ software development kit (SDK) and IP for using the PolarFire devices to program a trained neural network without prior FPGA expertise. The latest offering simplifies edge-compute solution development in the thermally challenging environments of the IIoT and factory automation applications. The platform’s IP, hardware and tools for these solutions include:

Embedded Vision – Supports the following: dual 4K MIPI CSI-2 cameras; HDMI® 2.0 with expansion based on the FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC); CoaXPress® 2.0; SDI (6 Gbps and 12 Gbps); Universal Serial 10 GE Media Independent Interface (USXGMII) MAC IP with auto-negotiation; and USB 3.1 Gen 1 and Gen 2 protocols.

IIoT and factory automation – Enables: Wi-Fi®/Bluetooth®; USB 2.0; SD Card; Embedded MultiMediaCard (eMMC); fully integrated Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe®) endpoint and root port functionality configured for four lanes; and a mikroBUS™ connector that can be used with Microchip’s Trust&GO platform for secure cloud connectivity.

The platform includes support for Microchip’s Mi-V RISC-V ecosystem including development tools from AdaCore, Green Hills Software, Mentor Graphics and Wind River. Commercial RTOS solutions are available including VxWorks® and Nucleus®, and free ones include Zephyr® and FreeRTOS™. Middleware solutions are available from DornerWorks, Hex Five and Veridify Security.

Microchip’s PolarFire SoC FPGAs combine thermal efficiency, and defense-grade security for smart, connected systems with half the power consumption of alternatives. The PolarFire SoC and the Smart Embedded Vision Platform offer designers the choice of rich operating system-based edge compute, hard real-time, with large 2 MB memory and mixed real-time plus rich OS support. Users can learn one platform and serve three applications.