SiFive Launches Advanced Trace and Debug Toolkit – SiFive Insight
This toolkit helps users access, observe, and control processor development in real-time, thus accelerating time-to-market for chips.
Recently, SiFive, a leading provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon solutions, announced the launch of SiFive Insight. SiFive Insight is a toolkit that enables faster chip design, hardware-software integration, and application development through hardware Trace and Debug. It is also the industry’s first Trace and Debug combined solution that complies with the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture.
Access, Observe, and Control
SiFive Insight provides a comprehensive toolkit that combines Trace and Debug features, making product development faster and easier. SiFive has invested heavily in the Trace functionality of SiFive Insight to meet customer demands and expectations for accessing, observing, and controlling products, now deployed in SiFive RISC-V core IP series.SiFive Insight includes many open-source contributions that will help develop the growing RISC-V ecosystem, including a C++ cross-platform Nexus5001™ Trace decoder for RISC-V. The Nexus5001™ Trace specification is an open and auditable standard that defines a wide range of processor Trace and Trace-related features. SiFive Insight Trace complies with the currently proposed RISC-V Nexus Trace working group specifications.SiFive Insight is applicable to all SiFive RISC-V Core IP products provided by SiFive Core Designer, which is an award-winning (1) cloud-based tool for defining and customizing RISC-V processor cores.
Industry Support
Many leading software development companies, whose applications and embedded processor toolkits also support SiFive Insight, will make it very easy for developers to use SiFive processor IP and develop RISC-V applications.IAR Systems Chief Strategy Officer Anders Holmberg stated: “The rapid growth of the RISC-V ecosystem requires powerful tools and solutions to accelerate new product development. IAR Systems’ leading software tools fully support SiFive Insight’s Trace and Debug solutions, enhancing application performance and shortening time-to-market for companies choosing RISC-V for their next innovation.”Lauterbach Chief Technology Officer Stephan Lauterbach stated: “RISC-V is an important contributor to the expansion of smart products. Our TRACE32 Debug and Trace tools fully support SiFive Insight, providing developers with world-leading tools that can seamlessly integrate into the rapidly evolving RISC-V ecosystem.”SEGGER Founder Rolf Segger stated: “All of our products are fully compatible with SiFive’s RISC-V cores. With SiFive Insight, SiFive can now provide very valuable additional Debug and Trace capabilities. At SEGGER, we ensure that industry-leading J-Link and Ozone debuggers can fully utilize these excellent new features.“
Market Focus
As RISC-V continues to gain traction in automotive, networking, enterprise, mission-critical, and IoT markets, the ability to rapidly create reliable systems is crucial. The open instruction set, software, and standards used by SiFive ensure quality through reliable verification mechanisms.SiFive President and CEO Dr. Naveed Sherwani stated: “Our mission is to bring high-quality products to market quickly, especially in the rapidly growing smart product and TinyML markets. SiFive Insight enables our customers to continue developing RISC-V-based applications without changing their workflows, and allows new developers to easily adopt exciting new technologies. For new domain-specific accelerators and embedded devices, especially those with edge decision-making capabilities, SiFive Insight can rapidly drive their creation.“ For more information about SiFive InSight, please visit SiFive.com/SiFive-Insight or browse the SiFive Insight launch blog.
（1）- SiFive Core Designer won the design tools and development software category at the 2019 Elektra Awards.
About SiFive
SiFive’s mission is to free the current fixed development path of semiconductors, remove the constraints of traditional instruction sets, and prevent fragmentation of processor cores. Based on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture, SiFive has leading market processor core IP and chip solutions. With RISC-V architecture, SiFive has the capability to customize cores to meet various market demands, enabling SoC designers to shorten time-to-market, reduce costs, customize processor cores based on open architectures, and allow developers equal access to silicon solutions. SiFive’s founders are also the creators of RISC-V, and the company currently has 16 design centers globally, with support from Sutter Hill Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Spark Capital, Osage University Partners, Chengwei, Huami, SK Hynix, Intel Capital, and Western Digital. For more information, please visit www.sifive.com.