RIGOLETTO
A European Automotive RISC-V Hardware Platform
Start: 07/2025
End: 06/2028
RIGOLETTO is a European research and innovation project developing a next-generation automotive hardware platform based on the open RISC-V instruction set architecture. The project brings together leading European companies and research organizations to develop processor cores, accelerators, interconnects, memory hierarchies, peripheral subsystems, and design tools for software-defined vehicles.
Recent advancements in electrification, autonomy, and digital technologies have resulted in the development of more sophisticated vehicles. However, the existing decentralised architecture of multi-electronic control units (ECUs) struggles to support this growth due to rising software and hardware complexity. The EU-funded Rigoletto project will lay the groundwork for developing a next-generation automotive hardware platform based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). This initiative seeks to reinforce Europe’s leadership in the future of automotive electronics, especially considering the shift towards centralised electronic/electrical (E/E) architecture and the merging of ECUs into Domain Control Units (DCUs) or Zonal Control Units (ZCUs).
RIGOLETTO is a further step towards combining the strengths of FZI in the design of embedded hardware platforms, E/E architectures and complex automotive applications. The long-term goal of the FZI is to be able to analyse, explore and validate automotive hardware and software platforms incl. accelerators and tooling together with it partners from the automotive industry.
As coordinator of the Transformations-Hub Automotive Software Engineering (TASTE) funded in Germany and partner in FEDERATE, the FZI will provide the progress made by RIGOLETTO, HAL4SDV and Shift2SDV in defining the SDV concept (hardware to middleware) and the associated reference architecture to the German automotive supply industry.
One key focus is the time-predictable acceleration of neural networks. To this end, the MultiVic hardware architecture and the associated MLIR-based compiler are being enhanced.
In the context of RIGOLETTO, FZI is also providing a hardware generator-based approach built around the Chipyard ecosystem for easy integration of different IPs, together with the insertion of safety mechanisms required for automotive platforms.
