Microchip RISC-V Development Kit

"Icicle Development Kit for PolarFire FPGAs brings together numerous Mi-V partners to accelerate customer design,” according to the company, “Designers who want to deploy a programmable Risc-V-based SoC/FPGA are now able to evaluate Risc-V ecosystem products such as real-time operating systems (RTOS), debuggers, compilers, and security solutions.”

The board is called PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit (MPFS-ICICLE-KIT-ES) and it is built around an FPGA with CPU cores called MPFS250T-FCVG484EES.

This chip is Microship’s first ‘PolarFire SOC’, differentiating is from earlier ‘PolarFire’ products which are FPGAs with no processor.

It is a “system-on-chip FPGA with a deterministic, coherent Risc-V CPU cluster and a deterministic L2 memory subsystem enabling Linux and real-time applications”, according to the company.

It has five Risc-V cores: a SiFive E51 monitor core (1 x RV64IMAC) and a quad SiFive U54 application cores (4 x RV64GC) – see diagram left.

Alongside the cores on the chip is an embedded trace macro from UltraSoC, secure boot, 254k LE of non-volatile programmable fabric, 784 18×18 math blocks and 4 12.7Gbit/s SERDES – all in a 19 × 19mm, 0.8mm pitch FCVG484 package.

Then to this the board adds (diagram right) LPDDR4 RAM, QSPI flash and eMMC flash, as well as 2x Gbit Ethernet (VSC8662XIC) and other comms ports (PCIe, USB 2.0 (USB3340-EZK-TR), UART, SPI, I2S and CAN), and then expansion headers for Raspberry Pi and mikroBUS peripherals. For power management, PAC1934T-I/JQ current sensing chips are built into the board.

There is a limitation for use: “A Libero Silver license is required with the PolarFire SoC Icicle kit to evaluate your designs. A Silver license is free and valid for 1 year. It supports single language simulation with programming and debugging features,” according to the company.

The board is said to be compatible with development tools from Adacore, Green Hills, Mentor and Wind River, as well as commercial RTOSssuch as Nucleus and VxWorks “that complement Microchip’s Linux and bare-metal solutions”, said Microchip.

Also middleware from DornerWorks, Hex Five, Veridify Security and wolfSSL, then “SOM and design services from organisations such as Antmicro, ARIES Embedded, Digital Core Technologies, Emdalo Technologies, Sundance DSP and Trenz Electronic,” said Microchip.