The Infineon AURIX RC1 Family Is Here – With VLAB Support

Infineon just presented the RISC-V-based AURIX RC1 family of microcontroller units (MCUs), and the Cadence VLAB team is proud to announce that we are part of the enablement program for the new AURIX MCU.

The AURIX RC1 is Infineon’s flagship product for the next generation of automotive microcontrollers, and a major milestone for Infineon and the industry at large. It marks Infineon’s first use of RISC-V-based cores in safety-critical automotive applications, and it is also the first RISC-V-based platform released for VLAB.

Supporting the AURIX RC1 family is a natural continuation of our long relationship with Infineon and the users of Infineon MCUs. We have supported the AURIX family for more than a decade, and today the AURIX TC3 and TC4 are a core part of our virtual platform product lineup.

"We consider the introduction of our new AURIX RC1 family much beyond the new microcontroller architecture itself,” said Thomas Schneid, Vice President Software and Ecosystem Management at Infineon. “Our new open architecture based on RISC-V comes with a growing holistic ecosystem. Together with ecosystem partners such as Cadence and their solution VLAB we are creating an open and scalable software, tools, and services environment that enables customers to build on their existing investments, simplify migration, and accelerate innovation on AURIX RC1.”

The VLAB Model

The new AURIX RC1 VLAB model features fast VLAB Hipercore RISC-V processor core models, running on top of the high-performance and multithreaded Hipersim simulation kernel. Like all VLAB models, it can run on laptops, workstations, on-premises servers, or cloud machines. It models not just the RISC-V processor cores, but also the peripherals that make the AURIX family tailored for automotive applications.

Going beyond the AURIX MCU, VLAB lets you model your ECU with all its peripheral chips and on-board buses. This enables the execution of unmodified target software from the actual ECU.

VLAB Throughout the Life Cycle

The VLAB model will support your board, ECU, software, and system development through the product life cycle. It starts with early hardware availability and “shift-left,” and continues with the main system development effort as the new AURIX MCU is integrated into a complete system. Once the final product (like a car) is shipping, the VLAB virtual platforms will be used to enable continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) for the system software.

Note that shift-left applies at multiple levels of aggregation. Initially, virtual platforms can be used to develop firmware and software for individual IP blocks. Next, IP blocks are integrated into a chip, and the corresponding chip model is used to develop chip-level software including secure boot, bare-metal software, operating system support, software development kits, and more. Even when the chip exists, the integration of a chip onto a specific board is another point where virtualization can provide shift-left – think of it as a virtual design-in activity. Finally, boards can be combined into systems before the actual systems can be built.

As hinted at in the picture above, VLAB connects to other simulation models to enable true system-level and vehicle-level virtual platforms and digital twins. This is particularly important for software-defined vehicles (SDV) and Physical AI applications that run software across a set of communicating ECUs while sensing and controlling the physical world. In the end, automotive and embedded software is built to control and interact with the world, and the world needs to be part of the virtualization solution.

SDV requires an agile and software-centric development approach, and virtual platforms and digital twins are key to making that a reality. They support continuous software development, regression testing, and validation, as long as the system is in use – which can be a decade or more.

Ecosystem Support

Cadence VLAB virtual platform is not an isolated tool, but rather a natural team player in an ecosystem of tools. The virtual platform, just like the hardware, relies on compilers to generate code to run, debuggers to debug and trace, and test tools to exercise the software and system.

For the AURIX RC1, we are working with tool partners to ensure that RISC-V is as well-supported as other architectures when it comes to tool connections. In addition, we are enabling debug for programmable acceleration engines – there is a lot more to the chip than just the processor cores, after all.

Working with the tool ecosystem is not just a matter of point-to-point connections to other tools. As illustrated above, it is not uncommon for several tools to be part of the same flow – such as a software testing tool using a debugger to connect to the virtual platform. In addition, scripting (usually in Python) can be used to control an ensemble of tools including one or more virtual platforms, attached physical world simulators, software debuggers, testing tools, and more.

AI for Embedded Systems

Agentic AI is a perfect match for virtual platforms. The VLAB team has used AI to build the virtual platform, to simplify the use of the virtual platform, and to resolve problems in the software running on the virtual platform. AI is going to be a real help when evolving system and software designs from previous Infineon AURIX generations to the new RISC-V-based MCUs.

An AI agent needs a tool to run and investigate the embedded software and how it behaves in the system context. A virtual platform is a whole lot easier to use than a hardware platform – in particular when we add simulations of the physical world and coordination with other tools. The agent can instantiate dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of virtual systems on demand in order to test various hypotheses. That just cannot be done using physical hardware.

It is really amazing to see them work out problems from vague descriptions like “the operating system does not boot” – forming a plan, evaluating alternatives, reading source code, making changes, and running experiments on the virtual platform.

Learn More

Cadence VLAB is here to help you get started with the new AURIX RC1 family, starting with reference platforms and continuing to ECU models built to mirror your real ECUs. From shift-left and pre-hardware software development to long-term system maintenance and digital twin construction.

By combining Infineon’s leadership in automotive semiconductors with Cadence VLAB virtual development environments and virtualization expertise, we help customers bring software-defined vehicle capabilities to market faster, with lower risk and greater flexibility.

Learn more about how Cadence supports developers building physical AI, automotive, and embedded systems with the Cadence Physical AI Stack, Cadence Automotive Solutions, and VLAB Works.