Siflower SF21H8898 is a quad-core 64-bit RISC-V SoC for industrial gateways, routers, and controllers

Siflower SF21H8898 SoC features a quad-core 64-bit RISC-V processor clocked at up to 1.25 GHz and a network processing unit (NPU) for handling traffic and is designed for industrial-grade gateways, controllers, and routers.

The chip supports up to 2GB DDR3, DDR3L, or DDR4 memory, offers QSGMII (quad GbE), SGMII/HSGMII (GbE/2.5GbE), and RGMII (GbE) networking interfaces, and USB 2.0, PCIE 2.0, SPI, UART, I2C, and PWM interfaces.

Siflower SF21H8898 specifications:

CPU – Quad-core 64-bit RISC-V processor at up to 1.25 GHz
Cache
- 32KB L1 I-Cache and 32KB L1 D-Cache per core
- Shared 256 KB L2 cache
Memory – Up to 2GB 16-bit DDR3/3L up to 2133Mbps or DDR4 up to 2666Mbps
Storage – NAND and NOR SPI flash support
Networking
- 1x QSGMII interface (Serdes 5Gbps rate) for 4x external Gigabit Ethernet PHYs
- 1x SGMII/HSGMII interface (Serdes1.25/3.125Gbps rate) supporting Gigabit and 2.5Gbps modes
- 1x RGMII interface for Gigabit Ethernet
- 1x MDIO interface
- Hardware forwarding via NPU
  - IEEE802.3 Ethernet II protocols
  - Configurable jumbo frame length (9KB)
  - Port-based shaper and priority scheduling
  - IPv4, IPv6 packet parsing and forwarding based on ETHII, PPPoE, 802.3
  - VLAN-based layer 2 unicast and multicast forwarding
  - Hardware NAT forwarding
    - Basic NAT mode and Network address port translation(NAPT) mode, including full cone NAT, restricted cone NAT, port restricted cone NAT and symmetric NAT;
    - Source NAT (SNAT) and Destination NAT (DNAT)
  - Layer 3 routing
  - Flow classification ACL – The policies after flow classification include upsending, forwarding, discarding, mirroring, redirecting, speed limiting and priority updating, etc.
  - Hardware QoS
  - Rich message traffic (number, number of bytes) statistics
USB – 1x USB 2.0
High-speed expansion – 2x PCIe 2.0
Low-speed I/Os – 2x UART, 2x SPI, 2x I2C, 2x 16-bit PWM, up to 41x GPIO
Debug interface – JTAG
Security
- SHA, RSA, AES, MD5, etc.
- Hardware-level Security boot
Misc – On-chip temperature detection with +/- 3°C accuracy
Power Management
- 0.8V, 1.8V, and 3.3V supplies
- 2x VDT voltage detection
- Power-off detection and interrupt reporting
Package – 16x16mm FCCSP-390
Temperature Range – Operating: -40°C to +85°C; storage: -40°C to +125°C
Manufacturing Process – TSMC 12nm FFC

Siflower SF21H8898 gateway block diagram — Typical SF21H8898 design with 2.5GbE, multiple GbE, WiFi 5/6/7, and 4G LTE or 5G.

A typical industrial gateway based on the SF21H8898 RISC-V SoC would include one 2.5GbE port and five gigabit Ethernet ports implemented through the GMII interfaces, and WiFi 5/6/7 and 4G LTE/5G implemented through two PCIe 2.0 x1 interfaces.

It’s not the first time we cover a Siflower SoC on CNX Software, since I wrote about the SF19A28 MIPS SoC used in the Banana Pi BPI-WiFi5 router last November. At the time I thought software support would be poor, but I was corrected by readers, and Siflower SF19A2890 has had mainline OpenWrt support since September 2024 albeit not with mainline kernel. The status of the SF21H8898 RISC-V is less clear as I can’t find any reference to it in the OpenWrt source code. There are however some references in the Linux Kernel Mailing List.

Banana Pi BPI-RV2 SiFlower SF21H8898 router board — Banana Pi BPI-RV2 router board

I found out about the Siflower SF21H8898 through the upcoming Banana Pi BPI-RV2 router board. The documentation has the basic specifications of the board and Siflower SF21H8898 datasheet, but nothing about software support or price and availability information. So I’ll be patient and cover the board in more detail once it becomes available.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.