Alibaba's DAMO claims first RISC-V car CPU core rated ASIL-D

On October 19, at the RISC-V China Summit in Shenzhen, Alibaba's DAMO Academy put a new kind of car processor on the table. XuanTie E908A is not a chip anyone can buy: it is a CPU core, a design that chipmakers license and build into their own automotive system-on-chips. DAMO also published its first product roadmap, covering autonomous driving and embodied intelligence, the robotics field that shares many of the same constraints as cars.

RISC-V is an open instruction set, meaning the basic language a processor understands is free for anyone to use. Carmakers have been reluctant to put it in critical systems, and automotive safety certification has been one of the main gaps. The safety grading comes from the ISO 26262 standard. DAMO says E908A is the first RISC-V CPU core to meet both the ASIL-B and ASIL-D levels, and that it pushes its single-point fault metric, which measures the share of single-point hardware faults a design can detect or contain before they cause a hazard, above 90%.

DAMO aims the core at three jobs inside a car. The first is safety islands: monitoring cores that keep watch over a larger processor and take over if it fails. The second is domain controllers, and the third is in-vehicle gateways, which route traffic between electronic control units, the small computers that run individual functions. All three need predictable real-time computing.

The roadmap is the other half of the announcement. The next processor, C950A, extends the XuanTie C950 that DAMO introduced in March, and it is targeted at five times the performance of current automotive RISC-V products. DAMO gave no release date or detailed specifications. At the summit, chief scientist Meng Jianyi said high-performance RISC-V needs sustained engineering and validation to move from usable to reliable before it can reach large-scale production.

For chip designers, the gain is time and money: a certified core means they no longer need to develop their own safety-qualified CPU to build RISC-V automotive parts. Carmakers would feel the change only once chips built on E908A reach vehicles, and the sources give no date for that. The safety ratings and the C950A target remain DAMO's own claims.