On October 21st, at the 6th world internet conference, Alibaba Pingtou Ge announced that it had officially opened the design platform of low-power micro-control chip (MCU). This is the first time in China, and it is another big move after Pingtou brother released Xuantie 910, Sword-less SoC and Glow 800 successively.
Pingtou Ge said that the open-source MCU chip platform meets the customized chip design needs in the AIoT era, and the target groups include chip design companies, IP suppliers, universities and research institutes.
Developers can design customized chips for sub-sectors based on the platform, IP suppliers can develop core IP native to the platform, and universities and research institutes can carry out chip-related teaching and research activities.
Pingtou Ge open source MCU platform includes a complete set of modules such as processor, basic interface IP, operating system, software driver, development tools, etc. It is equipped with Xuantie 902 processor and provides a variety of IPS and drivers, which can enable users to quickly integrate and verify and reduce the development cost of basic modules.
Among them, Xuantie 902 processor is based on open source RISC-V CPU architecture, compatible with RV32EMC instruction set, and adopts two-stage minimalist pipeline, which is suitable for IoT applications that are extremely sensitive to power consumption and cost. The source code includes basic hardware code and supporting software code, which has been published in GitHub open source community.
It is understood that with the open source chip design platform, users no longer need to invest heavily in designing the basic component IP in the early stage. They only need to complete the fragmentation scenario and demand definition, and design and verify the domain-oriented functional IP, so they can quickly complete the chip mass production.
Pingtou revealed that more IP and darksteel processors will be opened in the future.
In August this year, Pingtou Ge released a one-stop chip design platform, Wujian, which can provide a stable and reliable design platform and verification platform, help users save a lot of cost and time in testing, streaming and other links, and reduce the chip design cost and design cycle by more than 50%.
The open source MCU chip design platform belongs to the basic component of the sword-less platform. Pingtou hopes to share the basic common ability of chip design with the whole industry in this way.
Data show that the traditional MCU(Micro Controller Unit), also known as single chip microcomputer and microcontroller, is a chip-level computer that integrates CPU, RAM, ROM, timing counter and various I/O interfaces on one chip. As the core component of embedded equipment, MCU is widely used in communication, consumer electronics, automotive electronics and industrial control, and it is the chip type with the greatest market demand.
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