Low-power RISC-V integration, customization and SoC design services

CSEM’s RISC-V expertise is the result from extensive and early participation in the RISC-V community and developing SoCs with RISC-V. As one of the first members of RISC-V International, CSEM has been participating in workgroups and contributed to the trace and debug specification.

CSEM has also done a number of projects using RISC-V processors, one of which is the customization of a processor to reduce the power consumption so that it can be implemented in an autonomously powered wireless wearable device. The project resulted in an industry grade core with 3.2 CoreMark/MHz and 2.23uW/MHz in a 22nm process.

Why RISC-V?

RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA), which is quickly gaining popularity and is now a viable alternative for ARM, certainly in low power applications, such as Edge computing and IoT.

The benefit of the RISC-V open standard is that companies implementing processors on their SoCs have much more freedom to decide whether they develop in-house, use open source, or buy propriatary cores, and have a much wider range of support/service models and possibilities for customizations than is the case in other ISA eco-systems. RISC-V has reduced significantly the problem of 'Vendor lock-in', and open-source implementations have even eliminated this process completely.

CSEM offers

  • Selection of the most suitable processor for your project
  • Customization of RISC-V cores to your specific use case
  • Seamless and Industry grade integration into a custom ASIC
    Compatible with debugging and tracing tools such as IAR, Segger, Lauterbach and open-source tools
    Deep expertise and IP for security / RTOS / AI accelerators / Bluetooth / energy harvesting / analog / RF
  • Full SoC design and verification

CSEM is the perfect partner for short time-to-market projects where you:

  • implement a processor on your SoC for the first time, or;
  • need a smooth transition from another ISA eco-system to the RISC-V ecosystem, or;
  • have very challenging low power requirements

Supported processors

CSEM supports a wide range of processors from ultra low power 32bit to high performance 64bit processors

Other on request

Related Information

icyFlex-V – CSEM's low power RISC-V processor