Germano Brunacci
Germano Brunacci earned his degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Ferrara, Italy, in 2000. He began his career as a firmware developer, contributing to projects across the automotive, medical, and telecommunications sectors from 2000 to 2010.
In 2010 he joined FIAMM, and later MIDAC, where he served as Firmware Lead Engineer, focusing on Battery Management Systems (BMS) for advanced battery technologies. From 2018 to 2023, he was BMS Component Responsible for 800 V Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) at MASERATI, playing a key role in high-voltage system development.
Since 2023, Germano has been part of GLIWA, where he is involved in development of customer specific solutions, as well as training and coaching activities in the field of real-time embedded systems.
Session
The Raspberry Pi Pico2 is an ideal platform to showcase the state of RISC-V capabilities in the realm of embedded real-time systems. When switching from the ARM Cortex-M33 to the RISC-V Hazard3 CPU cores everything else stays the same: memory subsystem, clock tree, peripherals. This allows for an apples-to-apples comparison of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two CPU implementations by compiling the same C code for both architectures. We present a detailed comparison of relative performance and assembly code differences as well as insight on how much effort using RISC-V instead of ARM on the RP2350 MCU powering the Pico2 really adds.