Hex Five adds MultiZone Security to the Andes RISC-V Cores on GOWIN FPGAs

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 9, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Hex Five Security, Inc., the creator of MultiZone™ Security, Andes Technology Corporation and GOWIN Semiconductor Corp announce a collaboration to enable MultiZone^TM Security, the first Trusted Execution Environment for RISC-V on the Andes N(X)25 RISC-V Cores, which is part of 25-series, with the GOWIN GW-2A Family of FPGAs.

Hex Five's patent pending technology provides policy-based hardware-enforced separation for an unlimited number of security zones, with full control over data, code, interrupts and peripherals. MultiZone's™ Configurator takes fully compiled and linked customer code and merges it with Hex Five's nanoKernel to enable rapid adoption without any changes to hardware or customer code basis.

Andes 32-bit N25(F)/A25, and 64-bit NX25(F)/AX25 are versatile CPU cores compliant to RISC-V ISA that deliver over 3.5 CoreMark/MHz and 1.3 WMIPS/MHz for single precision floating point. Their common features include dynamic branch prediction, instruction and data caches, local memories, and Andes Custom Extension™ (ACE) to simplify instructions design for Domain-Specific Acceleration. All cores support User/Machine mode, while the A25/AX25 add Supervisor mode and MMU for Linux kernel and its applications.

GOWIN's GW2A Family is designed to offer the best-in-class performance cost ratio FPGA. With abundant logic, high-performance DSP resources and high speed I/O, the family is optimized for co-processing to offload the application processor on intensive computation tasks. The GW2A family is also the first FPGA with embedded pSRAM in the industry, which gives customers more usable device I/O.

"The Chinese market will be the first mass adopter of RISC-V," said Dr. Charlie Su, CTO and Senior VP of Andes.  "We're happy to work with Hex Five to provide our customers a simple, robust security implementation that based on our RISC-V cores and comprehensive AndeSight™, an eclipse-based development environment and optimized toolchains to provide leading performance and reduced development time."

"Increasingly, customers in China see security as a core requirement of their products," said Jim Gao, Director of Solution Development, GOWIN Semiconductor.  "With MultiZone Security, they can implement a robust security solution on our existing FPGAs without the need for new hardware, deep security expertise or even any changes to their toolset and workflow.  This allows a customer to get to market fast, which is the goal of our FPGA solutions."

"The cost of a robust security implementation on RISC-V is now negligible - the future of RISC-V is security by default," said Don Barnetson, co-founder of Hex Five Security.  "We're very excited to enter the Chinese market with such strong partners and expand access to simple, robust security that any developer can  implement."

Hex Five, Andes and GOWIN Semiconductor will demonstrate MultiZone™ Security at Andes RISC-V CON on Nov 13, 2018 at Andes RISC-V CON in Santa Clara, CA.  http://www.andestech.com/Andes_RISC-V_CON/2018/

About Andes Technology Corporation

Andes Technology Corporation was founded in Hsinchu Science Park, Taiwan in 2005 to develop innovative high-performance/low-power 32/64-bit processor cores and associated development environment to serve worldwide rapidly growing embedded system applications. The company delivers the best super low power CPU cores, including the rising star RISC-V series with integrated development environment and associated software and hardware solutions for efficient SoC design. Up to the end of 2017, the cumulative amount of SoCs containing Andes' CPU IP reaches 2.5 billion. To meet the demanding requirements of today's electronic devices, Andes Technology delivers configurable software/hardware IP and scalable platforms to respond to customers' needs for quality products and faster time-to-market. Andes Technology's comprehensive CPU line includes entry-level, mid-range, high-end, extensible and security families to address the full range of embedded electronics products, especially for connected, smart and green applications. From 2017, Andes expanded its product line and provides a total solution of RISC-V, the RISC-V series as V5 families processors cores include 32/64-bit N25/NX25 for general purpose, N25F/NX25F for floating-point intensive applications and A25/AX25 for Linux-based applications.

For more information about Andes Technology, please visit http://www.andestech.com/

About GOWIN Semiconductor Corp

Founded in 2014, GOWIN Semiconductor Corp., headquartered with major R&D in China, has the vision to accelerate customer innovation world wide with our programmable solutions. We focus on optimizing our products and removing barriers for customers using programmable logic devices. Our commitment to technology and quality enables customers to reduce the total cost of ownership from using FPGA on their production boards. Our offerings include a broad portfolio of programmable logic devices, design software, intellectual property (IP) cores, reference designs, and development kits. We strive to serve customers in the consumer, industrial, communication, medical, and automotive markets worldwide.

For more information about GOWIN, please visit http://www.gowinsemi.com/

About Hex Five Security

Hex Five is the creator of MultiZone™ Security, the first trusted execution environment (TEE) for RISC-V. Hex Five's patent pending technology provides policy-based hardware-enforced separation for an unlimited number of security domains, with full control over data, code, interrupts and peripherals. Contrary to traditional solutions, MultiZone™ Security requires no additional hardware, dedicated cores or clunky programming models. Open source libraries, third party binaries and legacy code can be configured in minutes to achieve unprecedented levels of safety and security.

MultiZone™ Security is a free and open standard.  Download it from the open source repository at https://github.com/hex-five

For more information visit https://www.hex-five.com/

SOURCE Hex Five Security, Inc.

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