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SYSGO and SiFive have intensified their collaboration and developed a PikeOS board support package (BSP) for the SiFive HiFive Unmatched mini-ITX board, which is used to evaluate safety-critical real-time applications based on the SiFive Freedom U740 RISC-V based quad-core processor chip. The new real-time capable evaluation platform with integrated hypervisor support opens up new horizons in terms of performance for developers of RISC-V based applications. In combination with the PikeOS real-time operating system and hypervisor, multifunctional real-time applications based on the rapidly gaining importance of the open-source RISC-V architecture become possible. Target markets are primarily deterministic real-time applications with high requirements for functional safety and cybersecurity, as found in the automotive, rail and avionics industries, as well as industrial automation, robotics and medical technology.

"The RISC-V architecture will become increasingly important as a reliable open-source technology in the coming years, as it makes it easier to develop comprehensively secure applications based on dedicated processor designs," said Franz Walkembach, VP Marketing & Alliances at SYSGO. "With our PikeOS support, we make it suitable for safety-critical real-time applications and also conveniently certifiable thanks to our OS building blocks."

"Together with RTOS expert SYSGO, we are pushing open the door to safety-critical real-time applications for our customizable RISC-V application processor based on an open-source processor architecture," said Chris Jones, VP Product at SiFive. "The PikeOS and hypervisor integration makes our SiFive HiFive Unmatched development system an evaluation platform for applications requiring hard real-time and SIL-certifiable safety, as well as cybersecure IIoT connectivity.”

Combined with SYSGO's PikeOS, SiFive's HiFive Unmatched development system provides developers with a particularly powerful platform for evaluating mixed-critical safe applications based on RISC-V architecture. With its Mix+Match core complex, the SiFive FU740 SoC processor integrates four high-performance SiFive Essential™ U74 processors and one S7 processor and offers multiple PCIe lanes as well as GbE, USB and graphics support, among other features. With the hypervisor technology integrated into PikeOS, safety-critical real-time applications can even be cyber-connected to the IIoT by running IoT gateway and GUI applications in parallel on the real-time SoC, consolidating the required hardware on just one SoC.

The PikeOS integration supports all features of SiFive's HiFive Unmatched developer board. The board is also suitable for Linux-based embedded applications that can be hosted in virtual machines using PikeOS without disturbing the deterministic real-time capability of the RTOS application. In addition to the 64-bit SiFive Freedom U740 processor, the board in the common Mini-ITX format offers 16 gigabytes of DDR4 RAM and 32 MB of Quad SPI Flash as well as two M.2 slots, which provide space for an NVMe SSD (via 4 PCIe lanes) as well as a Bluetooth or Wifi adapter (via 1 PCIe lane). Besides that, it offers interfaces for MicroSD, 1x GbE and 4x USB 3.2. There are 8 PCIe Gen3 lanes available via the x16 graphics card slot. In addition, the HiFive Unmatched provides UART and JTAG interfaces for programming, debugging and testing.

PikeOS BSPs for SiFive's HiFive Unmatched developer board are available now from SYSGO. For more information, visit www.sysgo.com/pikeos-bsp
 

About SiFive

As the pioneers who introduced RISC-V to the world, SiFive is transforming the future of compute by bringing the limitless potential of RISC-V to the highest performance and most data-intensive applications in the world. SiFive’s unrivaled compute platforms have enabled leading technology companies around the world to innovate, optimize and deliver the most advanced solutions of tomorrow across every market segment of chip design, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, automotive, data center, mobile, and consumer. With SiFive, the future of RISC-V has no limits. For more information, please visit www.sifive.com

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