PaulStoffregen
Well-known member
I talked with a couple people from SiFive at Crowd Supply's Teardown 2018 Conference about someday (maybe, very hypothetically) using RISC-V for future Teensy.
Just to be clear, Teensy 4.x will definitely be based on NXP's iMXRT chips, which use ARM Cortex-M7.
But in the more distant future, RISC-V and especially the prospect of a fully custom chip seems quite intriguing. Whether PJRC could afford to fund such a thing alone is a good question. Well, today the answer is probably no. In the future, a few years from now, who knows? Maybe it could be done as a collaboration with other maker-focused companies like Adafruit or Sparkfun. Or maybe an ARM license isn't as unobtainable as it might seem, with Arduino now partially owned by ARM.
I must say, even though I did make a chip 25 years ago as a grad student, this idea still seems a little crazy. Then again, maybe it's more achievable than I'm imagining?
So the question... what would go into a custom chip? For anything analog, how would it be designed & verified?
Just to be clear, Teensy 4.x will definitely be based on NXP's iMXRT chips, which use ARM Cortex-M7.
But in the more distant future, RISC-V and especially the prospect of a fully custom chip seems quite intriguing. Whether PJRC could afford to fund such a thing alone is a good question. Well, today the answer is probably no. In the future, a few years from now, who knows? Maybe it could be done as a collaboration with other maker-focused companies like Adafruit or Sparkfun. Or maybe an ARM license isn't as unobtainable as it might seem, with Arduino now partially owned by ARM.
I must say, even though I did make a chip 25 years ago as a grad student, this idea still seems a little crazy. Then again, maybe it's more achievable than I'm imagining?
So the question... what would go into a custom chip? For anything analog, how would it be designed & verified?