Semidynamics' Aliado SDK Accelerates AI Development for RISC-V with Seamless ONNX Integration

Barcelona, Spain – March 4, 2025 -- Semidynamics, the leading IP company for high performance, AI-enabled, RISC-V processors, has announced its support for the ONNX Runtime and the availability of its RISC-V Software Development Kit (SDK), Aliado.

Semidynamics has integrated support for its hardware into ONNX Runtime, enabling end-users to seamlessly integrate AI into their applications. The ONNX project, originally developed by Microsoft, defines a common standard for AI models and all major AI frameworks support importing or exporting ONNX-format models. Most open-source AI model repositories, such as HuggingFace, already provide models in the ONNX format enabling ONNX users to import practically any model currently available, without any model compilation step.

On top of the ONNX format, the ONNX-Runtime can then take ONNX models and execute them in a variety of hardware. It also provides a suite of tools to perform model optimization and even quantization. With the newly integrated support for Semidynamics hardware, end-users will be ready to develop their AI applications from day one.

For end-users developing RISC-V applications in general, the Aliado SDK enables quick and seamless development, debugging and fine-tuning of applications for Semidynamics hardware. It provides a complete software development solution including a compilation and debugging toolchain, emulators for functional testing of applications and a highly optimized library of common routines, all integrated into a single development environment.

Users can easily get started with a Windows WSL or Linux compatible, fully integrated development environment (IDE). The IDE is an Eclipse-based complete solution that has been integrated with all the Aliado SDK features, enabling users to write C and C++ applications with as little friction as possible. Backing the IDE is a comprehensive toolchain for compiling and debugging code targeting Semidynamics hardware. It is based both on the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and LLVM, providing two of the most common and familiar environments for users, including code optimization and auto-vectorization. The toolchain is integrated with the IDE but is compatible with any IDE of choice.

Any RISC-V compiled code can then be functionally validated from x86 workstations using QEMU or Spike emulators, modified to support Semidynamics’ custom instructions. QEMU provides fast functional validation and is capable of both system and user mode emulations, whereas Spike is the official RISC-V International’s simulator. The SDK also facilitates bare metal development for Spike, for end-users targeting embedded systems.

Finally, the core of Semidynamics’ support for AI, the Kernel Library, is included, which is what backs Semidynamics’ integrated support in ONNX-Runtime. This was created to leverage the performance of the Semidynamics RISC-V hardware most efficiently. It is a collection of functions operating on multi-dimensional data with a particular focus on AI. A large number of crucial operations, such as Matrix multiplications, transpositions, activation functions, and more, have been optimized for Semidynamics hardware enabling quick development of efficient AI applications.

Everything will be available for download at semidynamics.com/software

Roger Espasa, CEO of Semidynamics, added, “Our philosophy is to always make it very easy for end-users to use our products. Our support for ONNX-RT and Aliado SDK will enable them to rapidly develop and test their software on their PCs to see how well it will perform on our hardware. This really speeds up time to market as it can all be perfected in simulation before any hardware is actually created.”

Semidynamics www.semidynamics.com

Founded in 2016 and based in Barcelona, Spain, Semidynamics^® is the only provider of fully customisable RISC-V processor IP and specialises in high bandwidth, high performance cores with Vector Units and Tensor Units targeted at machine learning and AI applications. The company is privately owned and is a strategic member of the RISC-V Alliance.

Enquiries to info@semidynamics.com