Infineon to bring RISC-V to the automotive industry with plans for new MCU family

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Infineon Technologies is planning to launch a new automotive microcontroller family based on RISC-V within the next few years.

Infineon plans to bring RISC-V MCU to the automotive industry Credit: thanarak - adobe.stock.com

This new family will become part of Infineon’s established automotive microcontroller brand AURIX and will extend the company’s existing automotive microcontroller portfolio, which is based on TriCore (AURIX TC family) and Arm (TRAVEO family, PSOC family).

According to Infineon, the new AURIX family will cover a wide range of automotive applications from entry-level MCUs up to high-performance MCUs beyond what is currently available in the market.

Infineon will use Embedded World 2025 to introduce a virtual prototype enabled by key ecosystem partners. This is a starter kit for Infineon’s partners to begin pre-silicon software development.

“Infineon is committed to making RISC-V the open standard for the automotive industry,” said Peter Schiefer, President of Infineon’s Automotive Division. “In the era of software-defined vehicles, real-time performance, safe and secured computing as well as flexibility, scalability and software portability become even more important than today. Microcontrollers based on RISC-V help to meet these complex requirements, reducing vehicle complexity and time to market at the same time.”

Infineon currently has a market share of 28.5 percent of the global automotive MCU market (source: TechInsights: Automotive Semiconductor Vendor Market Shares. 2001 through 2023). Through the joint venture Quintauris, it has been working with other leading players of the semiconductor industry to accelerate the industrialisation of RISC-V-based products.

Infineon is now the first semiconductor supplier to announce an automotive RISC-V microcontroller family.

To facilitate adoption of the future product family, Infineon is working closely with its software and tool partners to establish a comprehensive ecosystem. The virtual prototype starter kit – to be presented at Embedded World 2025 - is based on the tool suite of Infineon’s strategic partner Synopsys. It allows Infineon’s partners to start developing their software and tool products for Infineon’s RISC-V architecture already, before the microcontroller hardware is available.

Several partners such as IAR, Elektrobit, Green Hills, HighTec, Lauterbach, PLS, Synopsys, and Tasking have already started to use the software development kit and will showcase their first solutions at Embedded World 2025.

More partners are expected to follow in the course of 2025. Based on their solutions, the virtual prototype will evolve into a full-fledged digital twin of Infineon’s future microcontroller family, enabling customers to shift-left their development and gain significant time-to-market.