As the first company to introduce an automotive-grade RISC-V MCU family, Infineon introduces RISC-V to the automotive sector
2025-03-11 10:09:30 802
March 10, 2025, Munich, Germany With the release of a new generation of RISC-V-based automotive microcontrollers (MCUs) in the upcoming years, Infineon Technologies AG will take the lead in the automobile industry's adoption of RISC-V. Infineon will enhance its current automotive MCU range based on TriCoreTM (AURIX™ TC family) and Arm® (TRAVEO™ family, PSOC™ family) by integrating this new family into its well-known automotive MCU brand AURIX™. From entry-level MCUs to high-performance MCUs that surpass the present market, this new AURIXTM family will address a broad variety of automotive applications. Infineon will present a virtual prototype at Embedded World 2025 that was created in collaboration with important ecosystem partners and will act as an entry-level kit for Infineon partners to begin pre-silicon software development.
Peter Schiefer, president of Infineon Technologies' Automotive Electronics Business Unit, stated that the company is dedicated to establishing RISC-V as an open standard for the automotive sector. Real-time performance, secure and dependable computing, as well as flexibility, scalability, and software portability, are becoming more and more crucial in the age of the software-defined automobile. In addition to lowering vehicle complexity and speeding time-to-market, RISC-V-based MCUs assist in meeting these intricate requirements.
Figure. 1 Peter Schiefer, President of Infineon Technologies' Automotive Electronics Business Unit
With a 28.5% market share, Infineon leads the global automotive MCU industry (Source: TechInsights: Automotive Semiconductor Vendor Market Share, 2001 to 2023). Through the joint venture Quintauris, the company has been collaborating with other leading companies in the semiconductor industry to expedite the industrialization of products based on RISC-V. A line of automotive-grade RISC-V MCUs has been announced by Infineon, the first semiconductor supplier to do so.
Infineon is collaborating closely with its software and tooling partners to create a comprehensive ecosystem that will help popularize this future product line. The tool suite of Synopsys, Infineon's strategic partner, served as the foundation for the Virtual Prototyping Starter Kit that was showcased at Embedded World 2025. The kit will help to speed up the creation and growth of the ecosystem by enabling Infineon partners to begin creating development software and tooling products for Infineon's RISC-V architecture even before this MCU hardware is ready.
Several partners, including IAR, Elektrobit, Green Hills, HighTec, Lauterbach, PLS, Synopsys, and Tasking, have already begun using the software development kit and will be showcasing the initial solutions at Embedded World 2025. Throughout 2025, more partners will join the group. For Infineon's upcoming MCU families, virtual prototypes will develop into full digital twins based on their solutions, assisting clients with advance development testing and drastically cutting time-to-market.