Charter

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, 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 in-vehicle compute. This disruption, along with the maturity of the RISC-V ecosystem, presents a rare opportunity for RISC-V to gain traction in automotive segments.

For the success of the activity, it is vitally important to address both:

1. Creation of application-specific compute solutions within and beyond existing RISC-V ISA/extensions/profiles (‘normative’ portion),

2. 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 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 all kind of initiatives (industry, academia, governmental) to enable and promote the adoption of RISC-V in automotive applications.

• 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:

• 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

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

• 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 establish 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).