Microchip PolarFire Takes a RISC (-V)

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eejournal.com, Dec. 18, 2019 – 

FPGAs and embedded processors are the new chocolate and peanut butter. Although each of the two technologies is powerful and useful all on its own, combining them on one chip brings a whole new level of capability to the table. (And they taste great together, too.) When Microchip bought Microsemi – which previously bought Actel – they inherited a robust line of low-power, high-reliability FPGAs. And, while these have traditionally been high-value niche devices for specialized markets such as military and aerospace, Microchip aims to move into the mainstream with a new "SoC" version of their PolarFire FPGA family.

PolarFire is a mid-range FPGA family that brings 100K to 500K logic elements with 12.7 Gbps SerDes transceivers, which the company claims deliver significantly lower power consumption, better security, and higher reliability than mid-range devices from other vendors. The power consumption advantage, in particular, has won the original PolarFire numerous sockets where other mid-range FPGAs couldn't fit the power budget.

Now, the company has announced a new "SoC" version of PolarFire that adds an abundance of processor power to the mix, in the form of a five-core RISC-V processing subsystem. As we saw at last week's RISC-V Summit, there is tremendous industry momentum around the open-source RISC-V ISA right now, and the PolarFire SoC is the first SoC FPGA to integrate hardened RISC-V processors (other FPGAs offer RISC-V as a soft core that can be implemented in FPGA LUT fabric).

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