On Automotive Electronics

Champions of RISC-V have targeted the automotive market for development as carmakers transition to electric vehicles and from distributed to centralized E/E architectures. Many of the 100, or so, ECUs in a typical auto will be replaced by several immensely more capable ECUs under the management of SoCs, each with multiple advanced high-performance processing cores. This will open the door to new semiconductor IP and new players in the automotive market. RISC-V is the fifth-generation RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture, which specifies what the processor is capable of doing and how its computational tasks get done. Open source and royalty-free, RISC-V is the most prominent example thus far of open-source hardware. Because it is open source, advocates of RISC-V believe that it will have a similar trajectory in the auto industry as has Linux, which has become infotainment's leading operating system and will eventually be widely used elsewhere in the vehicle, once it is safety certified under ISO 26262. The argument for open-source computing IP is the same as for Linux: It is freely accessible and anyone can inspect, modify and enhance it. The IP will be seen and critiqued by a large community of engineers, a process that makes it secure and of high quality. …