GigaDevice is a well-established mainland Chinese flash manufacturer that built up a successful microcontroller business. While ARM controllers with a wireless module have been available for a long time, the RISC/V offering has been focused on compute controllers. With the GD32VW553, GigaDevice offers a RISC/V-based SOC for connectivity applications.

While the part has been publicly known for some time, GigaDevice used its appearance at the RISC/V summit to formalise the announcement for non-mainland markets.

Not all RISC cores are created equal

RISC-V is an ISA - however, not all cores based on it have the same functionality. In particular, vendors can extend the instruction sets with add-on packages. In the case of the GigaDevice GD32VW553, the data sheets inform us of the presence of the following functionalities:

  • RV32I / M / A / F / D / C / P / B instruction extensions support.
  • Support Physical Memory Protection (PMP) to protect the memory, 8 entries.
  • Support Instruction Cache (I-Cache), 2-way associative, cache line size 32 bytes, total 32KB.
  • Support single / double precision FPU.
  • Support 2 cycle floating point MAC.
  • Support packed-SIMD DSP.

Given that the GD32VW553 is intended for Internet-of-things applications, GigaDevice adds cryptographic accelerators. In particular, the system can accelerate classic cryptographic algorithms via its CAU engine, while the HAU engine is responsible for hash algorithms. The data sheet contains detailed information on the supported algorithms: the figure provides a partial overview of the accelerated algorithms.

In terms of physical housings, GigaDevice supports both QFN32 and QFN40 packages. The datasheet contains the table below, which provides an overview of the various variants and their interaction capabilities.

Analysis of GPIO capabilities

Integral wireless microcontrollers often need more peripheral devices. GigaDevice knows these needs: the parts come with either 21 or 28 GPIO pins. Furthermore, some of them are 5-volt-tolerant - this reduces the amount of attenuation circuitry required for interfacing with legacy control devices.

In particular, the AD converter stands out: in the data sheet, GigaDevice claims the following performance numbers: A 12-bit 3 MSPS multi-channel ADC is integrated in the device. It has a total of 11 multiplexed channels: up to 9 external channels, 1 channel for internal temperature sensor (V SENSE), 1 channel for internal reference voltage (V REFINT). The input voltage range is between 0 and V DDA. An on-chip hardware oversampling scheme improves performance while off-loading the related computational burden from the CPU.

On wireless technology

GigaDevice provides the GD32VW553 with a wireless transceiver for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections. The Bluetooth LE version supported out of the box is 5.2, whereas the Wi-Fi support is described as 802.11ax. In addition to the required industry certifications, the chip has also been certified by CSA and Matter. There is a realistic possibility of GigaDevice eventually offering a module version similar to some ESP32 solutions. 

Availability and development environment

In terms of the development environment, GigaDevice has established a partnership with Segger of Germany. Users of the GigaDevice core will be allowed to use the development tools and real-time operating systems. A recent press release claims that a free suite will be available, stating “Germany's SEGGER, the industry's leading supplier of embedded development systems, has reached a strategic cooperation with GigaDevice to provide developers with a fully free and commercially available SEGGER Embedded Studio integrated development environment (IDE) and a complete set of development tools”.

In addition to that, it is likely that other RISC-V tools will eventually also support the core: the processor IP is provided by Nuclei.

In addition, quite a bit of documentation and literature is already available. First of all, the product homepage at https://www.gigadevice.com/product/mcu/risc-v/gd32vw553kmq7 provides a data sheet and technical documentation: in the case of GigaDevice, documents are split up into two groups. The data sheet provides an overview, while the technical documentation looks at the individual peripherals at a register level. In addition to that, Segger of Germany has a Wiki page at https://www.segger.com/supported-devices/search/GD32VW553, which provides further information about the part at hand. Finally, a video with a more detailed analysis can be obtained by visiting the URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZLBoEZqUjE.

During the chip shortage, the GigaDevice ecosystem showed itself to be self-sustaining and stable. This alone should be enough reason to give the GD32VW553 a chance, if a RISC-V core with advanced wireless capabilities is required.