“We are excited to extend our work with Qualcomm Technologies and bring a RISC-V wearable solution to
market,” said Google general manager Bjorn Kilburn.
Leading up to this, the companies will continue to invest in Snapdragon Wear platforms for the Wear OS ecosystem, according to Qualcomm.
Very little at all has been revealed about these RISC-V ICs – watch this space as Electronics Weekly has asked for more information.
RISC-V ecosystem boost
At the end of May this year, Google and Qualcomm were amongst the impressive list of founders of a project intended to create a commercial-grade software eco-system for RISC-V application processors – including development tools and libraries (LLVM and GCC were mentioned), virtualisation support, language run-times, Linux distribution integration, and system firmware.”
Called the RISC-V Software Ecosystem Project (‘Rise Project’), fellow founders were Andes, Intel, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek, Nvidia, Red Hat, Rivos, Samsung, SiFive, T-Head, and Ventana. It will be hosted by Linux Foundation Europe, which said that they will be “working upstream first with existing open source communities in accordance with open-source best practices”.
Rise Project members will contribute financially and provide engineering resources to address specific software deliverables prioritised by a technical steering committee.
“As a global community, we have made tremendous progress in RISC-V adoption,” said RISC-V International CEO Calista Redmond. “We are grateful to the thousands of engineers making upstream contributions and to the organisations coming together now to invest in tools and libraries in support of the RISC-V software ecosystem. Accelerating adoption is our shared mission. The collective investment of our community and in the Rise Project will build on that momentum.”
RISC-V automotive ICs
In August, Qualcomm joined another impressive consortium, this time to found a German company (as yet un-named) that “will be a single source to enable compatible RISC-V based products, provide reference architectures, and help establish solutions widely used in the industry”, it said at the time. “Initial application focus will be automotive, but with an eventual expansion to include mobile and IoT.”
The other companies that announced investment into this company were Robert Bosch, Infineon Technologies, Nordic Semiconductor and NXP Semiconductors.
“As vehicles become software-defined and dependability requirements increase, there is a general need for standardisation and ecosystem compatibility across the industry, with CPUs being a key IP,” said Infineon division president Peter Schiefer. “We are proud to support the establishment of trusted RISC-V based automotive products with this initiative. The knowledge and expertise of leading market players will unleash the full potential of RISC-V in the automotive sector.”
