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The Automotive SIG provides a global forum for technical and strategic input to enable or accelerate the adoption of RISC-V-related technology in the automotive industry.
ADAS: Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. While aimed at assisting a human driver, ADAS systems utilize many of the technologies required for autonomous vehicles. Investments in these technologies represent a significant step toward autonomy.
V2X: Vehicle-to-X communications. “X” may refer to all vehicle communications or be replaced by specific letters denoting Vehicle, Infrastructure, Network, Pedestrian, Device, or Grid (among others).
ASIL: Automotive Safety Integrity Level, as defined in ISO 26262. Four levels are specified, ranging from ‘ASIL-A,’ applicable to systems with the lowest degree of hazard, to ‘ASIL-D,’ for systems with the highest.
SOTIF: Safety Of The Intended Functionality. This covers insufficiencies in the specification or performance of vehicle automation systems under operational conditions rather than functional faults (as defined in ISO 21448:2022).
, specifically for in-vehicle compute.
Background
The global automotive industry is undergoing its greatest disruption in decades, driven by the shift away from fossil fuels and the progression toward autonomous vehicles—coupled with increasing consumer demand for advanced functionality. This transformation is being realized through vastly increased onboard computing capabilities, centralization, and a move from domain-based to zonal-based architectures. These trends have led to a massive increase in the requirements for both in-vehicle and V2X communicationscompute. This disruption, along with the maturity of the RISC-V ecosystem, presents a rare opportunity for new compute architectures to achieve rapid adoption, but the process is already well underway and gathering paceRISC-V to gain traction in automotive segments.
For the success of the activity, it is vitally important to address both:
Creation of application-specific compute solutions within and beyond existing RISC-V ISA/extensions/profiles (‘normative’ portion),
Establish trust/confidence by major automotive players in the provided solutions (‘informative’ portion).
Scope
The scope of the Automotive SIG includes:
Creating and maintaining a “gap analysis” to identify aspects currently missing in the list of requirements for RISC-V ISA and ecosystem for effectively addressing the automotive market.
Prioritizing activities to address identified gaps between these requirements and existing RISC-V support.
Proposing or interfacing with industry initiatives all kind of initiatives (industry, academia, governmental) to enable and promote the adoption of RISC-V in automotive applications.
Applying AI to automotive applications and ensuring SOTIF, as defined in ISO 21448.
Developing (through task groups) technologies that advance the safety, security, functionality, and performance of automotive systems.Work with existing task groups and propose new task groups to create RISC-V ISA extensions and non-ISA related improvements for the safe, secure, optimized execution of automotive workloads.
Supporting the development of ecosystem tools and software, including operating systems and other support organizations.
The Automotive SIG will aim to improve the ease of adopting RISC-V-based technology in:
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ADAS and autonomous vehicles, covering all SAE J3016 levels (0–5).
Infotainment (IVI)
All compute supporting various architectures including Centralized, Distributed and Zonal Architectures
Electrification including battery control and electric drive
Drivetrain management.
Body control.
V2X communications.
In-vehicle systems and supporting systems, such as charging points, road infrastructure, and communication networks.
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To address these applications the SIG will address topics such as
Safety (e.g. ISO26262)
Security (e.g. ISO21434 or SESIP)
Scalable performance from micro-controller class through large multi-core application class
Realtime Performance
Profiles
To achieve its goals, the Automotive SIG will interact with:
Functional Safety SIG.
Trusted Computing SIG.
SOC Infrastructure HC.Other relevant groups as applicable.
Hypervisors (HV) SIG
Runtime Integrity SIG / Security HC
Reliability and Serviceability (RAS) SIG
Fast Interrupts
Advanced Interrupt Architecture (AIA) TG
Server-SoC SIG
AI ML SIG
Other
Deliverables
The Automotive SIG will not deliver any specifications, standards, or recommendations. Instead, it will develop an overall strategy and establish priorities, creating task groups to produce identified outputsestablish task groups and interact with existing task groups to acheive the following goals:
The implementation of changes or additions to RISC-V standards and recommendations in order to better enable uptake in the automotive industry (‘normative’ portion)
Support, Recommendations and Advocacy for the adoption of RISC-V in the automotive industry ecosystem (‘non-normative’ portion).
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