The HiFive1 is an Arduino-compatible development kit featuring the Freedom E310, the industry’s first commercially available RISC-V SoC.
The Freedom E310 (FE310) is the first member of the Freedom Everywhere family of customizable SoCs. Designed for microcontroller, embedded, IoT, and wearable applications, the FE310 features SiFive’s E31 CPU Coreplex, a high-performance, 32-bit RV32IMAC core. Running at 320+ MHz, the FE310 is among the fastest microcontrollers in the market.
Additional features include a 16KB L1 Instruction Cache, a 16KB Data SRAM scratchpad, hardware multiply/divide, a debug module, flexible clock generation with on-chip oscillators and PLLs, and a wide variety of peripherals including UARTs, QSPI, PWMs, and timers. Multiple power domains and a low-power standby mode ensure a wide variety of applications can benefit from the FE310.
The FE310 is the first open-source RISC-V SoC available in industry. SiFive has contributed the FE310 RTL code to the open source community. That means you can see what’s inside the chip and completely understand how the hardware works.
Take a look: SiFive GitHub
By releasing the RTL code, SiFive wants to encourage open source development of both software support for RISC-V as well as promote open hardware development.
The RTL code also empowers chip designers with the ability to customize their own SoC on top of the base FE310. For system architects, developers, or companies without chip design capabilities, SiFive’s “chips-as-a-service” offering can customize the FE310 to meet their unique needs.
Unless you had millions of dollars to spend, the dream of getting custom silicon was just that – a dream. With the end of conventional transistor scaling and escalating chip design costs, the silicon industry is no longer able to serve the fragmented market and the needs of the next generation of innovators.
At SiFive, we believe that by bringing the power of open-source and agile hardware design to the semiconductor industry, we greatly reduce the cost to harness the performance and energy-efficiency of custom silicon to the smallest company, inventor, or maker.
SiFive’s “chips-as-a-service” is meant for you – the system architect, developer, inventor, creator, and dreamer.
Do you want to write your own RTL? Download the open-source RTL to FE310 and connect your accelerator or peripheral right into the SoC and prototype it on our FPGA dev kits (available separately at dev.sifive.com. Then contact us about how we can quickly deliver an affordable sample of your custom chip and then take you to production by delivering packaged, tested chips.
Or, if you simply know what you want, we can customize the FE310 to meet your unique needs. No RTL needed. So play around with the HiFive1, develop some software, figure out what more you need in your version of the FE310.
Either way – come talk to SiFive. We can make and deliver your own custom chips based on the FE310 for much less than you’d probably pay just to license a different CPU core. Learn more about chips-as-a-service at www.sifive.com.
Perfect! This board is the first RISC-V based development kit in the market. As you can expect from SiFive and the inventors of RISC-V, the FE310 supports the latest RISC-V specifications as of Nov 27, 2016:
Help contribute the growing amount of open-source software already written for RISC-V: RISC-V Software Ecosystem Overview
You should buy this dev kit if you:
The HiFive1, powered by the Freedom E310 is:
A Great Arduino-Compatible Dev Kit!
| HiFive1 | Arduino 101 | Arduino Zero | Arduino Uno | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microcontroller | Freedom E310 | Intel Curie Module | Atmel ATSAMD21G18 | Atmel ATmega328P |
| Open-Source RTL? | Yes | No | No | No |
| CPU Speed | 320+ MHz | 32 MHz | 48 MHz | 16 MHz |
| Bits | 32-bit | 32-bit | 32-bit | 8-bit |
| CPU Core | SiFive E31 | Intel Quark SE | ARM Cortex M0+ | AVR |
| CPU ISA | RISC-V RV32IMAC | x86 | ARMv6-M | AVR |
| Performance | ||||
| DMIPs/MHz* | 1.61 | 1.3 | 0.93 | 0.30 |
| Total Dhrystones* | 515.2 | 41.6 | 44.64 | 5 |
| DMIPS/mW* | 3.16 | 0.35 | - | 0.10 |
| Board Specs | ||||
| IO Voltage | 3.3 V and 5 V | 3.3 V and 5 V | 3.3 V Only | 5 V Only |
| Digital IO | 19 | 14 | 14 | 14 |
| PWM | 9 | 4 | 10 | 6 |
| SRAM [kB] | 16 | 24 | 32 | 2 |
| Flash [kB] | 16384 | 196 | 256 | 32 |
| USB | Micro | Regular | 2 Micro | Regular |
* HiFive1 DMIPs/mW measured at 1.61 V, 200 MHz operation. Intel Dhrystone data and DMIPs/mW taken from their datasheet and product material. Arduino Uno DMIPs/mW estimated based on ATmega328P datasheet and this site.
We do plan to make the individual Freedom E310 chips available, but currently the only thing available is the Hifive1 board. There are some additional complexities associated with providing chips and support that we are working through. Please stay tuned for an update!
Update: Yes, you can. The FE310 chips are now available in packs of five right here from this project page.
SiFive has launched and demoed the first set of HiFive1 dev kits and Freedom Everywhere 310 SoCs at the 5th RISC-V Workshop held on November 29, 2016.
To get these dev kits to everybody as soon as possible, we are expediting our next manufacturing build. These limited run boards will be known as “HiFive1 Founder’s Edition” and will come with a special silkscreen featuring the signatures of the Founding Team at SiFive, and will be slightly more expensive than the production boards but will ship in December 2016.
The standard HiFive1 dev kits will be available by early February 2017.
Please note that these boards and chips are Engineering Samples, and are intended for development use only.
"The HiFive board is intended to drive demand for custom SoCs SiFive will design and comes with a growing pool of open source Linux variants and tools fed by an expanding foundation that maintains the RISC-V instruction set."
"Choice is always a good thing, and now SiFive, a fabless semiconductor company, has released the HiFive1 as a crowdfunding campaign on CrowdSupply. The heart of the HiFive1 is SiFive’s FE310 SoC, a 32-bit RISC-V core running at 320+ MHz."
"By contributing the FE310 RTL code to the open-source community, SiFive said it aims to encourage open-source development of both software support for RISC-V as well as other open hardware development."
"The FE310 is the first member of the Freedom Everywhere family of customizable SoCs designed for microcontroller, embedded, Internet of Things, and wearable applications."
"SiFive is on a mission to encourage open-source development of both software support for RISC-V as well as other open hardware development... SiFive’s “chips-as-a-service” offering can customize the FE310 to meet [developers'] unique needs."
"San Francisco-based startup SiFive unveiled the first system-on-chips based on the open source RISC-V processor architecture: a Linux-ready octa-core Freedom U500 and a FreeRTOS-based Freedom E300"
"Many [are] exhilarated by the prospects of free, flexible cores unencumbered by patents with an ecosystem of innovations around them."
"For those following the RISC-V space, SiFive's new Freedom E310 is a long-awaited milestone."
"The [HiFive1] SoC is based on the RISC-V open architecture and allows developers to create custom silicon solutions according to their particular design needs."
"The biggest selling point for RISC-V chips is that there are no licensing fees, and this microcontroller is Open Source. This is huge — your AVRs, PICs, ARMs, and every other microcontroller on the planet is closed hardware."
"San Francisco-based SiFive is on a mission to democratize access to custom silicon chip designs. The company’s founders invented RISC-V, a free and open instruction set architecture for modern microprocessors."
Produced by SiFive in San Mateo, CA.
Sold and shipped by Crowd Supply.
We’ve been amazed at the response to the HiFive1 boards, and surprised at how quickly the Founder’s Edition sold out! Due to popular demand, we dd an ultra quick-turn run of 150 HiFive1 units, which ship immediately. Please note that these boards are the same as the $59 HiFive1, except we will ship these earlier.
Get a single HiFive1 Dev Kit, featuring the SiFive Freedom E310 SoC, the industry’s first open source RISC-V SoC.
What’s better than a single HiFive1? Get one for you, and one for your whole team!
Get your very own, limited edition, HiFive1 Founder’s Edition! Only 250 of these will be available. Not only will you be among the first to have your very own RISC-V Development Kit featuring the industry’s first open source RISC-V SoC, but these special boards come silkscreened with the SiFive Founding Team’s Signatures. A great collector’s item and/or Christmas gift for your RISC-V enthusiast.
Get a single HiFive1 Founder's Edition, plus, you will get the opportunity to schedule two one-hour conference calls with Andrew, Krste, or Yunsup. You can spend this time discussing the topic of your choice! From getting tech support with your dev kit, to asking questions about how RISC-V started, or even debating computer architecture with them, the time is yours!
SiFive is the leading provider of processor cores, accelerators, and SoC IP to create domain-specific architecture based on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture. SiFive offers scalable, configurable processor cores pre-integrated with security, trace, and debug features for workload-specific accelerator designs. Founded by the inventors of RISC-V, SiFive has 15 design centers worldwide and backing from Sutter Hill Ventures, SK Hynix, Qualcomm Ventures, Western Digital, Intel Capital, Spark Capital, Osage University Partners, and Prosperity7 Ventures.
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