Computer hardware

Debugging

Implementation

Embedded system

Operating system

Computer science

Computer architecture

Instruction set

Reduced instruction set computing

Software engineering

Programming language

SystemC

Extensibility

Journal of Systems Architecture

Internet-of-Things (IoT) opens a new world of possibilities for both personal and industrial applications. At the heart of an IoT device, the processor is the core component. Hence, as an open and free instruction set architecture RISC-V is gaining huge popularity for IoT. A large ecosystem is available around RISC-V, including various RTL implementations at one end and high-speed instruction set simulators (ISSs) at the other end. These ISSs facilitate functional verification of RTL implementations as well as early SW development to some extent. However, being designed predominantly for speed, they can hardly be extended to support further system-level use cases such as design space exploration, power/timing/performance validation or analysis of complex HW/SW interactions. In this paper, we propose and implement a RISC-V based Virtual Prototype (VP) with the goal of filling this gap. We provide a 32 and 64 bit RISC-V core supporting the IMAC instruction set with different privilege levels, the RISC-V CLINT and PLIC interrupt controllers and an essential set of peripherals. We support simulation of (mixed 32 and 64 bit) multi-core platforms, provide SW debug and coverage measurement capabilities and support the FreeRTOS and Zephyr operating systems. The VP is designed as extensible and configurable platform with a generic bus system and implemented in standard-compliant SystemC and TLM-2.0. The latter point is very important, since it allows to leverage cutting-edge SystemC-based modeling techniques needed for the mentioned use cases. Our VP allows a significantly faster simulation compared to RTL, while being more accurate than existing ISSs. Finally, our RISC-V VP is fully open source (MIT licence) to help expanding the RISC-V ecosystem and stimulating further research and development.

RISC-V based virtual prototype: An extensible and configurable platform for the system-level