RISC-V Summit

The automotive industry is experiencing a massive paradigm shift. Cars are becoming increasingly autonomous, connected, and computerized. Modern E/E-architectures are pushing for an unforeseen functionality integration density, resulting in physically separate ECUs becoming virtualized and mapped to logical partitions within a single physical MCU. While functional safety has been pivotal for vehicle certification for decades, this increasing connectivity have shed light on the need for (cyber-)security and paved the way for the release of the new standard ISO21434. RISC-V has a pivotal opportunity to transform automotive computing systems, but we argue that current ISA / extensions are not ready yet. This talk provides our critical perspective on the existing limitations, particularly the upcoming WorldGuard technology, to address virtualized MCU requirements per foreseen automotive applications. We then present our proposal to address such limitations, mainly targeting master-side protection. We complete the talk by explaining the roadmap towards a full open-source Proof-of-Concept, which includes extending QEMU, an open-source RISC-V Core, and building a complete software stack.