RSD RISC-V Out-of-Order Superscalar Processor

RSD is a 32-bit RISC-V out-of-order superscalar processor core. RSD is very fast due to aggressive OoO features, while it is very compact and can be synthesized for small FPGAs. The key features of RSD are as follows:

• ISA
  • Support RV32IM
  • Support Zephyr applications
• Microarchitecture
  • 2-fetch front-end and 5-issue back-end pipelines
  • Up to 64 instructions are in-flight.
    • These parameters can be configurable.
  • A high-speed speculative instruction scheduler with a replay mechanism
  • Speculative OoO load/store execution and dynamic memory disambiguation
  • Non-blocking L1 data cache
  • Support AXI4 bus
• Implementation
  • Written in SystemVerilog
  • Can be simulated with Mentor Modelsim/QuestaSim, Verilator, and Vivado
  • Can be synthesized with Synopsys Synplify and Design Compiler
    • Design Compiler support is experimental
    • We are preparing the support for Xilinx Vivado.
  • Can run on a Xilinx Zynq board
    • Avnet Zedboard
  • FPGA optimized RAM structures

Getting started

Simulation on Verilator/Modelsim/QuestaSim/Vitis

1. Install the following software for running simulation.

   • GNU Make, Python3, and GCC (x86-64) 6 or later
   • GCC (RISC-V) 7 or later
   • Cygwin (if you use Windows)
   • Verilator or Mentor Modelsim/QuestaSim or Xilinx Vitis 2019.2

   Tested environment:

   • GNU Make 4.0
   • Python 3.4.2
   • GCC 6.5.0 (x86-64)
   • GCC 8.1.0 (RISC-V)
   • Verilator 4.026 2020-01-11 rev v4.026-2-g0c6c83e
   • QuestaSim 2019.4.2
   • Vitis 2019.2

2. Refer to scripts in Processor/Tools/SetEnv and set environment variables.

   • Use SetEnv.bat on Windows or SetEnv.sh on Linux
   • RSD_ROOT must be set for running simulation.
   • For Windows, RSD_CYGWIN_PATH should also be set
   • Set RSD_QUESTASIM_PATH when using Modelsim/QuestaSim

3. Go to Processor/Src and make as follows.

   • For Modelsim/QuestaSim

     make
     make run        # run simulation
     make kanata     # run simulation & outputs a konata log file
     

   • For Verilator, add -f Makefile.verilator.mk like make -f Makefile.verilator.mk run
   • For Vivado, add -f Makefile.vivado.mk like make -f Makefile.vivado.mk run

4. If the simulation ran successfully, you find "kanata.log" in Processor/Src.

   • Note that, the above sub-command is "kanata", not "konata".

5. You can see the execution pipeline of your simulation above with Konata.

   • Konata is a pipeline visualizer and can be downloaded from here
   • An example is shown below.
   • 

Run on a Xilinx Zynq board

• See this RSD wiki page.

Documents

• See RSD Wiki.

License

Copyright 2019 Ryota Shioya ([email protected]) and RSD contributors, see also CREDITS.md. This implementation is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0, see LICENSE for details. This implementation integrates third-party packages in accordance with the licenses presented in THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.md.

References

Susumu Mashimo et al., "An Open Source FPGA-Optimized Out-of-Order RISC-V Soft Processor", IEEE International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology (FPT), 2019. A pre-print version is here.