Efinix announced the Sapphire RV64 SoC, a 64-bit RISC-V processor core that expands the company’s Sapphire SoC suite. The core provides embedded designers with a configurable processor platform in a small, low-power footprint. Built on the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), Sapphire RV64 targets applications that have outgrown the performance, addressable memory, cache, and I/O limits of 32-bit embedded cores while requiring the flexibility and low power of an FPGA-based solution.
Tony Ngai, co-founder, Co-President, and CTO of Efinix, said: “Sapphire RV64 was designed so customers already using our 32-bit Sapphire SoCs can scale up without re-architecting their systems. It carries forward the same configurable, FPGA-native approach, but now with larger addressable memory, caching, and debug capability that 64-bit embedded Linux and AI workloads demand.”
Sapphire RV64 extends the architecture of Efinix’s existing 32-bit Sapphire RV32 SoC in several areas:
- A seven-stage pipeline implementing the RISC-V64IM ISA with optional A, F, D, C, Zba, Zbb, Zbs, and Zicbom extensions.
- 4 to 512 KB of on-chip RAM, a multi-way L1 instruction and data cache, and optional L2 cache, branch predictor, and hardware and software pre-fetchers.
- An optional SV39 memory management unit for Linux support.
- A memory controller supporting DDR3, HyperRAM, and LPDDR4x operation at up to 3,200 Mbps.
- Extensive debug support and native FPGA co-debug capabilities.
Mark Oliver, Vice President of Marketing at Efinix, said: “Customers building increasingly sophisticated embedded and edge AI systems have been asking us for a path to 64-bit processing without giving up the low power and configurability that made Sapphire successful. Sapphire RV64 gives designers that headroom, with larger memory spaces, deeper caches, and more capable debug, while staying true to the user-configurable philosophy of the entire Sapphire SoC suite.”
The Sapphire RV64 SoC joins Efinix’s existing lineup of 32-bit Sapphire cores, providing options from sub-4K-LE microcontroller sizes up to 64-bit designs with multi-gigabyte memory footprints and high-performance compute capabilities. The RV32 architecture includes custom instruction capability that enables FPGA acceleration in a software-defined flow for applications including edge AI.
Sapphire RV64 is available for all Titanium FPGAs, all Topaz FPGAs, and all Trion devices (T20 and above).
All Sapphire SoC cores, both 32-bit and 64-bit, are configured through the Efinity IP Manager and supported by the Efinity Integrated Development Environment, which provides a complete RTL-to-bitstream design flow. Software development, debugging, and BSP integration are supported by the Eclipse-based Efinity RISC-V Embedded Software IDE.
