Western Digital Enhanced RISC-V SweRV Core in Partnership With PlatformIO Labs and in Collaboration With SiFive

Western Digital Corp. (WDC) announced a strategic partnership with PlatformIO Labs, OÜ, in collaboration with SiFive, Inc., to extend the openness of PlatformIO vendor-agnostic embedded development platform to include new tools, thereby providing an end-to-end, open environment for innovation, including development for RISC-V.

Fueled by positive feedback from the developer community, the company also unveiled enhancements to its open-sourced RISC-V SweRV Core and cache-coherent fabric, OmniXtend.

Together, these announcements further the firm’s support of the RISC-V initiative and extend its leadership in the development of new open, purpose-built compute architectures to address the increase in data driven by high-growth applications such as AI, ML, and IoT.

“By teaming up with PlatformIO, we are bringing the entirety of its multi-architecture embedded design environment, including debug and trace, to the open-source community. With deep libraries and automated support already built-in, this will allow programmers to easily transition among development platforms, including RISC-V,” said Martin Fink, CTO, Western Digital. “The expanded openness of PlatformIO, along with our recent enhancements to our SweRV Core and OmniXtend cache-coherent fabric, further lowers the barrier for RISC-V development and expands the potential for innovation that will enable us to realize the benefits of bringing compute power closer to data.“

PlatformIO enables the streamlined design of a range of embedded hardware and software technology, supporting numerous leading OSs and development platforms, as well as hundreds of boards. Its unified project configuration capabilities leverage built-in package and library managers automatically install the required library and tool chains depending on a project build environment.

With support from strategic investments from Western Digital and SiFive, software programmers developing for RISC-V and other architectures can use use PlatformIO’s previously paid PlatformIO Plus features at no cost, including the PIO Plus Unified Debugger and PIO Uniting Testing Engine tools, as well as remote access capabilities. Engineers can also replicate their project in multiple OS environments, thereby providing greater design flexibility, and eliminating the need to learn complex vendor-specific toolkits. With the openness of these unique, multi-architecture testing and debugging resources, PlatformIO is a fully open-source supportive environment for end-to-end design of embedded technology, including those by the RISC-V ecosystem.

The company is also accelerating RISC-V hardware design with an updated SweRV Core. Integrated into SweRV Core 1.1 are a range of improvements that notably enhance its performance and reliability. These include faster divide and fetch functions, the incorporation of I/O timing control, better error correction capabilities, multi-core debug improvements and more. The 32-bit, in-order core was designed for internal usage and open-sourced to the RISC-V ecosystem by Western Digital earlier this year. Updated core will be available for download.

OmniXtend memory-centric

In addition, the firm’s OmniXtend memory-centric system architecture can operate with Barefoot Network’s end-user P4-programmable Tofino Ethernet switch ASIC.

OmniXtend, a new open approach to providing cache coherent memory-over-an-Ethernet fabric, enables access to and data sharing with a variety of components. The compatibility with the Tofino switch ASIC is significant as it allows data center architects to implement architectures where the main memory is central to the network. OmniXtend enables cache coherency to be equally shared with GPUs, FPGAs, ML accelerators and CPUs. This can support further advancements in data center architectures, CPU micro-architecture and purpose-built compute acceleration in data-centric devices.

These announcements build-on the company’s long-standing commitment to advancing the RISC-V ecosystem and driving data-centric innovation through open source collaboration, including multiple related strategic investments and partnerships, and demonstrated progress toward its stated goal of transitioning one billion of the firm’s processor cores to the RISC-V architecture. RISC-V enables the company to participate in and leverage a broad community of inventors focused on bringing increasing amounts of processing power closer to data. With compute power closer to data, customers can minimize data movement at the edge and within their data centers, optimizing processing that is based on location, workload or a time-value need.

“By teaming up with Western Digital and SiFive, we are able to further our vision to not only further expand the openness of the PlatformIO’s professional embedded development environment, but extend the PlatformIO ecosystem,” said Ivan Kravets, CEO, PlatformIO. “The ‘zero-configuration’ Platform Plus tools eliminate many of the most time-intensive aspects of software design and are enabling, better, less buggy code. By making these open-source, PlatformIO is now a fully free and open environment for next-generation design, from semiconductors to processor to software.“

“We are pleased to partner with Western Digital and PlatformIO to bring the PlatformIO’s tools to the open-source community,” said Yunsup Lee, CTO, SiFive. “The list of supported hardware and software solutions and automated capabilities offer the potential to reduce the time-to-market of innovative purpose-built software applications for IoT, AI, machine learning, analytics and more. As SiFive continues to drive innovation and provide leadership in the RISC-V space, an investment like this is key to enabling the marketplace for those who want to enjoy the benefits of the innovative solutions provided by RISC-V.“

Resources:
RISC-V innovations
Blog: OmniXtend Cache-Coherent Fabric Drives Innovation with RISC-V
Video: OmniXtend, an Open Cache Coherent Memory Fabric
SweRV Core
PlatformIO