Start developing for RISC-V with the $49 HiFive1 Revision B
The revised version of the HiFive1 embedded development board from SiFive adds Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support on the Arduino-compatible board.
On Tuesday, SiFive introduced a modest upgrade to the HiFive1 single-board computer (SBC), which is now powered by the newly-released FE310-G002 revision of SiFive’s E31 RISC-V core. The original HiFive1 and FE310-G000 were introduced in 2016.
The HiFive1 is 68 mm x 51 mm, 32-bit RISC-V development board, though it is intended for Internet of Things (IoT), Arduino, and real-time embedded applications. This is not a board on which developers should expect to run a desktop or server Linux distribution, like the Raspberry Pi 3 B+.
Image: SiFive
The FE310-G002 adds a low-power sleep mode and a 3.3V always-on domain (increased from the 1.8V of the original), as well as a hardware I²C, and a second UART. It contains a 32-bit RV32IMAC core with 16 KB L1 instruction cache, 16 KB SRAM, and hardware multiply/divide. The chip runs at “320+ MHz,” according to SiFive, and is touted as “among the fastest microcontrollers on the market.”
SEE: Hiring kit: IoT developer (Tech Pro Research)
The HiFive1 Rev B adds a Segger J-Link debugger. With this, the HiFive1 appears as a mass storage device when attached to a PC, enabling drag-and-drop flash programming. With the addition of the ESP32 co-processor, the board includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities.
SiFive offers a five-pack of the FE310-G002 chips for $25, a single HiFive1 Rev B for $49 when preordered, or a five-pack of the HiFive1 Rev B for $239 when preordered, all of which are available via Crowd Supply. Orders are expected to ship on April 16, 2019.
RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) which requires no royalties to be paid when manufacturing RISC-V CPUs. The project aims to design chips that can replace Arm CPUs in a variety of use cases. SiFive was founded by the inventors of the RISC-V ISA. The initiative has the backing of the Linux Foundation, with the newly-formed CHIPS Alliance seeing code and specification donations from Google, NVIDIA, Western Digital, and others.
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Image: SiFive
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