On December 16, HiSilicon announced that the A² MCU and MPU fully support openEuler at openEuler Summit 2023. HiSilicon A² is a new solution for home appliances, energy, industry, and automobile fields. It not only covers RISC-V-based MCU series, but also includes high-performance MPUs compatible with Arm instruction sets, as well as optimized OSs that closely cooperate with the MPUs.

A² represents the square of A (Application specific and Artificial intelligence). The former represents that HiSilicon is customer-centric and pursues close combination of chip design and customers' application scenarios. The later represents the application of AI technologies in MCUs and embedded solutions.

Recognizing the value brought by the in-depth combination of chips and OSs, the HiSilicon A² solution coordinates and optimizes MCUs featuring high real-time performance and MPUs requiring high-performance real-time computing with openEuler. Therefore, openEuler and UniProton, an open-source real-time OS based on openEuler, have become important parts in the HiSilicon A² solution. With the close cooperation between chips and OSs at the underlying layer, the HiSilicon A² solution can be customized and optimized for industry-specific scenarios to explore full performance of chips. For example, in industrial control scenarios, chips and the openEuler real-time OS can be adapted and optimized to achieve ultimate industrial-grade low latency and certainty.

Generally, to ensure high real-time performance of a task, most existing MCU solutions in the industry do not involve an OS, incapable of basic scheduling. Once the MCU code volume reaches tens of thousands lines, code writing complexity and maintenance difficulty increase greatly. Through joint innovation with openEuler and in-depth optimization of A² MCU and UniProton, HiSilicon develops the UniProton+Bare Metal hybrid deployment solution that can run on limited MCU resources. This solution has extremely low requirements on hardware resources. It can run with a minimum of 4 KB RAM and 4 KB flash memory. The hybrid solution enables high-real-time tasks to directly run in the bare metal environment without affecting their priority and real-time performance. For tasks that do not have high requirements on real-time performance, the scheduler provides multi-thread management capability to reduce the complexity of code writing and facilitates subsequent maintenance, application modification, and cross-chip application porting.

For high-performance MPUs, HiSilicon successfully implements hybrid deployment of multiple OS frameworks based on OpenAMP (asymmetric multi-processing). Customers can deploy multiple OS instances on one MPU. For example, the four main processors of one HiSilicon MPU can be divided into 3+1 cores. Based on OpenAMP, customers can deploy the openEuler non-real-time OS that requires ecosystem applications on three CPU cores and deploy the UniProton real-time OS on the other core. In this way, customers can use one chip to implement functions that are available only with two chips in the original solution, simplifying the system architecture, reducing costs, and improving system reliability. HiSilicon is the industry's first chip vendor that supports homogeneous and heterogeneous openEuler embedded multi-core hybrid deployment solutions.

In addition to in-depth collaboration with OSs, the HiSilicon A² solution also provides many other features, such as lightweight embedded AI that has low resource requirements and can be deployed on MCUs, advanced algorithms for industry applications, and RISC-V kernel that can customize instruction sets for industry scenarios. Through exploration and innovation in these technical directions, the HiSilicon A² solution has unique advantages in the MCU and embedded MPU fields.

Currently, HiSilicon A² MCU and MPU solutions have been deployed in multiple industry scenarios. For example, in the home appliance scenario, the HiSilicon MCU can save energy by 16% during air conditioner temperature adjustment. In industrial motion control scenarios, the HiSilicon MPU can limit time jitter within 1 μs in a 125-μs motion period, helping achieve faster task processing and higher certainty in semiconductor and laser fields.

"HiSilicon A² aims to bring more innovation and value to customers in the AI era through in-depth optimization with openEuler, instruction set customization, and embedded AI in the MCU and embedded MPU fields", said Li Ming, director of the MCU Product Mgmt Dept of HiSilicon.