As RISC-V grows stronger, Nuclei Technology and Andes Technology announce the establishment of a comprehensive and in-depth strategic partnership!

Andes Technology Corporation is an internationally renowned processor core IP listed technology company. It was founded in 2005 in Hsinchu Science Park, Taiwan. For more than ten years, it has been committed to creating value for customers and taking it as its mission to improve the speed of customer SoC product development. It focuses on providing customers with high-quality 32/64-bit RISC-V embedded processor cores and supporting software and hardware solutions, including the V5 instruction set based on the RISC-V architecture. Andes Technology's processor core AndesCore™ development technology is mature and has achieved considerable results in commercial promotion. In 2018 alone, the number of SoC chips embedded with Andes processor cores exceeded 1 billion, and the cumulative number reached 3.5 billion by the end of 2018. They are widely used in the fields of Internet of Things, voice recognition, deep learning, video games, touch screen controllers, GPS, wireless charging, storage, Bluetooth, WiFi, network equipment and sensors. Andes Technology is a founding member of the RISC-V Foundation, the convener or co-convener of several task groups, and one of the main maintainers of the RISC-V open source software GNU/LLVM tool chain and Linux core-related software. It also serves as the vice chairman of the China RISC-V Industry Alliance and is very active in promoting the RISC-V architecture and ecosystem.

Nuclei System Technology is a leading RISC-V processor core IP and solution company in mainland China. Since its inception, the company has focused on the research and development of RISC-V processor cores, helping to build the local RISC-V ecosystem and empowering local industries. Nuclei System Technology has developed rapidly since its establishment. In just a few months, it has completed key steps such as team building, tens of millions of angel round financing, and new product development and delivery. Nuclei System Technology is currently a silver member of the RISC-V Foundation, the vice chairman unit of the China RISC-V Industry Alliance, and a member unit of the China Open Instruction Ecosystem (RISC-V) Alliance.

The latest achievement of the cooperation between Nuclei Technology and Andes Technology, the AndesCore™ N22 series processor core IP based on the RISC-V architecture, has recently been officially released and launched on the market. This processor can be widely used in the Internet of Things (IoT) and embedded low-power fields, as well as control fields with high real-time requirements.

Mr. Hu Zhenbo, founder of Nucleo, said that in the open RISC-V ecosystem, there are also many open source free processor cores developed by different institutions, organizations or individuals, and users are faced with free and diverse choices. Therefore, commercial high-quality RISC-V processor core IP must have five elements:

• Professional, high-quality, and timely localized services ensure the long-term success of our customers;

• First-class design, mature and robust design methods, good code readability, and sufficient verification to ensure quality. Bringing convenience and confidence to customers' chip integration and ASIC processes. Improving product R&D efficiency for customers and seizing market opportunities are the basic requirements for commercial processor core IP;

• Excellent PPA (Power Performance Area) parameters and good scalability bring excellent competitiveness and differentiation to customers' products;

• Excellent code density saves valuable on-chip SRAM, Flash or ROM for customers' chips;

• The first-class graphical integrated development environment (IDE) improves user productivity through complete functions and excellent experience, which is extremely important for chip products targeting the AIoT field.

The AndesCore™ N22 processor core IP jointly developed by Nuclei Technology and Andes Technology fully meets the above five elements:

• Coreline Technology has a fully localized processor R&D and support team to provide customers with professional, high-quality and timely localized services;

• This processor core IP will be the most advanced commercial RISC-V processor core on the market. Among the RISC-V processor cores of the same level:

  ◆ Supports Andes Technology's RISC-V V5/V5e extended instruction set, with the best PPA index, performance can exceed 3.93 CoreMark/MHz ; gate count can be as low as 15K (minimum available configuration); frequency up to 800MHz (worst-case) and dynamic power consumption can be as low as 2.0 uW/MHz (TSMC 28nm HPC+) ;

  ◆ Optional functions such as dynamic branch prediction, fast multiplier, local memory for instructions and data, instruction cache, etc. can effectively improve processor performance;

  ◆ The latest fast interrupt standard is adopted, and the real-time performance of interrupt response is greatly improved;

  ◆ Adopt the latest debugging standards, with richer and more flexible debugging capabilities; also provide two-wire debugging module, which can save chip pin count and cost;

  ◆ The N22 processor core IP is written in the mature and robust Verilog HDL language, which has good user readability.

• 除了支持RISC-V公版工具链外，在使用晶心科技商业工具链的情况下，能够显著提升代码密度，缩小程序大小，降低客户芯片内存储的大小，缩小芯片的面积，降低成本和功耗；

• In addition, AndeSight™, a professional graphical integrated development environment (IDE) that comes with the N22 processor core, is currently the industry's most outstanding and widely accepted professional RISC-V IDE development tool. It is now also available for free download, allowing users to experience the efficiency improvement brought by the complete IDE functions first.

AndesCore™ N22 processor core IP has won market recognition since its release and is currently being introduced to several well-known chip customers at home and abroad. More advanced features will be added in the future, so stay tuned!