Bluespec, Inc. Releases Ultra-Low Footprint RISC-V Processor Family for Xilinx FPGAs, Offers Free Quick-Start Evaluation.

September 28, 2021 -- Bluespec, Inc., a founding member of RISC-V International and supplier of RISC-V Processor IP and tools, released the MCU RISC-V processor family targeted at ultra-low resource utilization on Xilinx FPGAs. The MCU family of RISC-V processors provides FPGA users with a fully RISC-V ISA compliant processor subsystem that requires less than 2000 LUTs on Xilinx devices, saving valuable on-chip resources for engineers to implement their proprietary logic. Bluespec also released an evaluation version of the low-footprint RISC-V processor that can be downloaded for free. Bluespec’s RISC-V MCU includes a pre-built open-source toolchain and reference designs for the Digilent® Arty Artix-7 FPGA Development board providing a low barrier path to begin developing their application in minutes with a professionally implemented, optimized, and verified RISC-V processor on Xilinx FPGAs. The RISC-V MCU evaluation can be downloaded at https://info.bluespec.com/mcueval.

MCU Family

Bluespec’s RISC-V MCU targets applications that require a processor to perform management and control functions while consuming a small amount of on chip resources. The MCU family is optimized for an efficient execution and low resource cost implementation and has versions that offer base Integer Instructions (I), Integer Multiplication and Division (M), and features:

• High frequency
• Optional Debug Module
• TCMs
• AXI4 Interfaces
• UART and GPIO

“Our mission at Bluespec is to make RISC-V widely accessible to the FPGA community. Engineers can use our RISC-V processors in their designs with confidence knowing that Bluespec’s RISC-V processors have been professionally implemented and verified by experts in the RISC-V processor and tools ecosystem,” said Bluespec VP of Product and Business Development, Loren Hobbs. “We are enabling the FPGA community with a barrier-free path to evaluating RISC-V in their designs. Bluespec takes care of the time-consuming aspects of using open-source IP by performing implementation and optimization as well as performing standard and proprietary verification. By providing a professionally implemented, supported, and maintained we can improve our customers time to market and efficiency, by focusing their resources on developing their differentiated products.”

Bluespec’s RISC-V MCU is the fourth and lowest footprint RISC-V processor family that Bluespec has released in 2021. The MCU family joins the RV32IMAC BMR family, which targets applications that run on bare-metal or a real-time operating system, the RV32IMAC SCL family, which targets single-core Linux application requirements, and the RV32GC SCL, which adds floating-point support to the single-core Linux family.

Bluespec provides products that fundamentally improve time to market for using open-source RISC-V cores. We enable companies to exploit RISC-V’s cost reduction and freedom to innovate without the support and productization risks of open-source hardware. Our development tools and pre-verified RISC-V cores enable customers to efficiently integrate, program, accelerate and verify RISC-V cores from best-in-class RISC-V open-source projects. For more information on Bluespec, Inc. visit bluespec.com.