Renesas Champions the RISC-V Cause With Its Own 32-bit RISC-V CPU

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Renesas has announced one of the first independently developed 32-bit RISC-V CPUs.

www.allaboutcircuits.com/, Dec. 06, 2023 – 

Renesas, long a major player in the industrial MCU and CPU universe, has announced the release of a new CPU family with a RISC-V core of its own design. The design joins Renesas' 32-bit arsenal, which includes Arm Cortex-M-based CPUs and the proprietary RX family. The devices are targeted at the general-purpose RISC-V market for consumer, industrial, healthcare, and IoT applications.

This is not the first RISC-V-based product from Renesas, but its prior offerings used designs by third-party IP providers, such as Andes Technology. With this new offering, Renesas designed and built its own from the open-source specifications. Having its own design RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) will enable greater customization for products in its core markets and allow Renesas to have control over product release timelines. Ultimately, RISC-V was created to give companies this type of flexibility without the extra work and limitations that come with a fully proprietary ISA.

A Win-Win for Renesas and RISC-V

RISC-V (pronounced "risk five") is an open-source instruction set architecture, originally designed as part of a 2010 research project out of the Parallel Computing Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. In recent years, RISC-V has gained broad acceptance and is now available as an IP package from multiple IP vendors and as hard and soft processor cores in FPGAs.

RISC-V has been gaining wider acceptance, and a full portfolio of offerings from Renesas is a significant win for the architecture. Renesas has a large footprint in automotive, industrial, and IoT solutions. Its processor portfolio contains custom architectures, Arm-based products, and now, RISC-V CPUs. Renesas may not be the most well-known microcontroller brand, but it is one of the most widely used due to its extensive automotive and industrial control products. A general-purpose RISC-V core from Renesas may help the company grow into more diverse markets by producing a powerful component based on the up-and-coming architecture.

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