Documentation

Introduction

This page is an index to documentation for our 64-bit RISC-V SoC platform. We’ll be refreshing with further pointers to documentation for our other projects.

These SoC platform code releases and documentation have the aim of easing the path of new users and students, providing a robust tested platform for research into computer architecture, and conforming to a license model which is compatible with commercial research and development as well as IC manufacture. The current release is:

  • lowRISC with Ariane SystemVerilog CPU and X-windows support
    Release version 0.7, released February 2020
    This release supports the Rocket CPU from the ariane-v0.7 release as well as the Ariane CPU. The (optional) Debian distribution has gone through some major refactoring to provide support for rust and llvm. We recommend using a slightly modified version of buildroot-2019.11-1, which includes preliminary support for X-windows. It does not support OpenGL or any kind of acceleration.

All releases are available here

What is included

Here you can find selected software and hardware IP which works together to produce an (almost) fully open-source computer system, consisting of:

  • RISCV CPU, either Rocket written in the Chisel/Scala hardware description language, or Ariane written in System Verilog
  • A variety of useful peripherals, UART, MMC/SD-Card controller, Ethernet(100/1000BaseT), Bluetooth, X-windows compatible screen
  • PC-Compatible HID keyboard interface, additional Bluetooth Keyboard/Mouse (additional interfacing hardware PMOD-BT required)
  • AXI compatible interface to proprietary DDR memory controller from Xilinx (included in Vivado)
  • Choice of three boot loaders (QSPI flash memory, MMC/SD-Card, tftp Ethernet)
  • RISCV-Linux kernel v5.3.18, supplemented with drivers to attach to the above peripherals
  • Linux userland operating system based on buildroot-2019.11-1

Getting started breakdown

The latest release has the instructions broken down by topic, instead of the release specific documentation that was included previously.

Internals description