Will RISC-V reduce auto MCU’s future risk?

By going RISC-V, suppliers of automotive MCUs based on proprietary processor cores hope to avoid getting designed out by OEMs and excluded from the huge Chinese market.

By Junko Yoshida for Yole Group | April 2, 2025

Automakers are at a crossroads. An open platform is inevitable even among traditionally conservative automakers. OEMs demand flexibility in software choices, hardware architecture and supply chains. First to take the plunge was Infineon Technologies (Infineon), the world’s largest automotive MCU supplier, unveiling its plans for a real-time automotive microcontroller family based on RISC-V.

With billions already sunk into its proprietary TriCore MCUs, Infineon’s RISC-V shift reflects a huge change in the company’s strategy.

Companies such as STMicroelectronics, Renesas and NXP Semiconductors all say they are already using RISC-V cores. But those RISC-V cores are deeply buried in their architecture for specific embedded applications, not the kind that’s an open-source instruction architecture exposed to application developers.

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