Checking Out RISC-V on the PolarFire Icicle Dev Kit

April 4, 2022

Editor Bill Wong takes a look at Microchip's FPGA system-on-chip with five RISC-V cores.

This video is in TechXchange: RISC-V: The Instruction-Set Alternative. Also, check out more Kit Close-up videos.

You can view the video (above) where I unbox Microchip's PolarFire Icicle Development Kit (Fig. 1). It's built around the PolarFire system-on-chip (SoC) that includes a 250K logic element (LE) FPGA and a five-core RISC-V system.

1. The Icicle Development Kit is built around Microchip's PolarFire FPGA system-on-chip with five RISC-V cores.

The PolarFire MPFS250T-FCVG484EES (Fig. 2) includes one 64-bit, RISC-V IMAC integer core and a complex of four 64-bit, RISC-V RVGC cores that can run operating systems such as Linux. The integer core includes secure-boot support and can manage the other processor cores as well as peripherals, providing a real-time software environment.

2. The PolarFire SoC includes an FPGA and a five-core RISC-V system, which includes one 64-bit integer core and four cores that can run operating systems like Linux.

The development kit PCB is filled with interfaces and off-chip memory (Fig. 3). This includes 1 Gb of SPI serial flash memory, 2 GB of DRAM, and an SDIO interface that can work with either the on-board 8 GB eMMC flash chip or an SD card plugged into the SD card socket. There are dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, CAN interfaces, and JTAG support. The Raspberry Pi and MikroBUS headers provide access to a wide array of peripheral modules that can plug into the system.

3. The Icicle Development Kit surrounds the PolarFire SoC with an array of interfaces including a MikroBus and Raspberry Pi header.

Microchip provides a number of development tools to help PolarFire developers (Fig. 4). The PolarFire SoC MSS Configurator generates configuration files for the Libero SoC IDE and the SoftConsole IDE. Libero SoC IDE is for FPGA development and the free Eclipse-based, SoftConsole IDE provides RISC-V software-development tools like C/C++ compilers and debuggers.

4. Microchip provides a number of tools for configuring the PolarFire SoC, programming the FPGA, and programming the RISC-V cores.

The development kit has its own SmartFusion 2 SoC/FPGA for programming. This is accessed via a micro-USB connection.

Microchip PolarFire Video

Here's another video on the PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit courtesy of Microchip.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.