A portable and Linux capable RISC-V computer system in Verilog HDL

TL;DR

This paper presents a portable, FPGA-based RISC-V computer system capable of booting Linux, designed with Verilog HDL to be resource-efficient and adaptable for low-cost hardware and accelerators.

Contribution

It introduces a Linux-capable RISC-V system on FPGA that is portable, resource-efficient, and customizable, filling a gap in publicly available systems.

Findings

Successfully implemented on low-cost FPGAs

Boots Linux operating system

Resource-efficient FPGA design

Abstract

RISC-V is an open and royalty free instruction set architecture which has been developed at the University of California, Berkeley. The processors using RISC-V can be designed and released freely. Because of this, various processor cores and system on chips (SoCs) have been released so far. However, there are a few public RISC-V computer systems that are portable and can boot Linux operating systems. In this paper, we describe a portable and Linux capable RISC-V computer system targeting FPGAs in Verilog HDL. This system can be implemented on an FPGA with fewer hardware resources, and can be implemented on low cost FPGAs or customized by introducing an accelerator. This paper also describes the knowledge obtained through the development of this RISC-V computer system.