Alibaba's DAMO Academy has introduced XuanTie E908A, an automotive-enhanced RISC-V processor design, at the RISC-V China Summit in Shenzhen on October 19. It also published its first product roadmap for autonomous driving and embodied intelligence.
E908A is a CPU IP core, not a finished chip. DAMO licenses the design to chipmakers, who integrate it into their own automotive system-on-chips. That makes it a building block for future vehicle silicon rather than a product carmakers can buy off the shelf today.
According to DAMO, E908A is the first RISC-V CPU IP to meet both the ASIL-B and ASIL-D levels of automotive functional safety. ASIL-D is the strictest level under the ISO 26262 standard, used for functions where a failure could put lives at risk, such as braking and steering. DAMO also says E908A pushes its single-point fault metric (SPFM) above 90%, which it calls an industry first. SPFM measures the share of single-point hardware faults a design can detect or contain before they cause a hazard.
DAMO is aiming E908A at three jobs inside a car: safety islands, the monitoring cores that keep watch over a larger processor and take over if it fails; domain controllers; and in-vehicle gateways that route traffic between electronic control units. All three need predictable real-time computing.
The roadmap is the other half of the announcement. DAMO says its XuanTie team is developing high-performance automotive processors for autonomous driving and embodied intelligence, the robotics field that shares many requirements with cars. The next-generation C950A is targeted to reach five times the performance of current automotive RISC-V products. DAMO did not give a release date or detailed specifications for C950A.
C950A extends the XuanTie C950, the high-performance RISC-V processor DAMO introduced in March. At the summit, DAMO chief scientist Meng Jianyi said high-performance RISC-V needs sustained engineering and validation to move from usable to reliable before it can reach large-scale production.
For RISC-V, the move matters because automotive safety certification has been one of the main gaps keeping the open instruction set out of critical vehicle systems. A certified IP core lowers the cost for chip designers who want to build RISC-V automotive parts without developing their own safety-qualified CPU.
The safety ratings and the C950A target are DAMO's own claims.
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