Microchip Upgrades Its Mi-V RV32 RISC-V Soft-Core Processor, Promises a Major Speed Boost

Microchip has announced the latest entry in the Mi-V ecosystem: Mi-V RV32 v4.0, a soft-core RISC-V processor for use with the company's field-programmable gate array (FPGA) range.

"The RISC-V architecture has transformed the semiconductor industry with its open-standard instruction set, enabling customizable and cost-effective processors," say Microchip's Ken O'Hagan and Minh Nguyen in a joint announcement. "Since its debut in 2020, the Mi-V RV32 IP [Intellectual Property] has been a cornerstone for our FPGA users, evolving through customer feedback and technological advancements. The upcoming v4.0 release reflects our commitment to pushing boundaries, integrating lessons from previous iterations to meet diverse application needs. As embedded systems demand higher performance and reliability, the Mi-V RV32 v4.0 is poised to lead in 2025, aligning with trends toward modular, scalable processor designs."

The new Mi-V RV32 v4.0 IP is, as before, built atop the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture — but comes with the promise of an up-to-30 percent speed boost over the current v3.1 release — even when running on the same hardware. This, Microchip says, is the result of a redesigned pipeline that avoids long paths wherever possible and is optimized specifically for implementation on an FPGA. Despite this, it's also suitable for resource-constrained devices: Microchip says a minimalist RV32I implementation takes up just 3,000 logic elements (LEs).

Other features of the new release include default Hamming 2 coding for all finite state machines (FSMs) with the option to use Hamming 3 for enhanced error correction, an integrated watchdog timer, support for error correction code (ECC) RAM or synthesizable soft triple-module-redundant (TMR) registers, up to 256kB of tightly coupled memory (TCM), conditional branch prediction, and support for the optional RISC-V M, C, F, and A extensions alongside the core RV32I implementation.

More information on Microchip's RISC-V soft processors is available on the company website; at the time of writing, Microchip had not confirmed availability for Mi-V RV32 V4.0 beyond stating that it would be coming some time this year.