The Embedded RISC-V Project

Last modified on Wed Mar 7 07:44:51 2018 UTC.

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Mission statement

Define a modern C/C++ friendly microcontroller architecture based on the RISC-V instruction set, that makes writing embedded software easier and more productive. And… enjoy the process!

In technical terms, the mission statement can be rephrased as: define a set of specifications for RISC-V microcontrollers intended for embedded real-time / low power / IoT applications that do not require an operating system. Favour C/C++ multi-threaded RTOS systems.

Preliminary specs

For convenience, the initial proposal for the RISC-V Microcontroller Profile specification uses the markdown syntax, and is available as the specs-markdown GitHub project.

Contributions are welcome in the project issues ar pull requests.

Project plan

The following steps are considered for the Embedded RISC-V project:

• incorporate feedback from the open source community and possibly from the industry and finalize the specifications
• implement a version in QEMU and port a RTOS (µOS++) to test the context switching mechanism
• synthesize a Verilog version that runs on the Arty board, similar to E31Arty/E51Arty bitstreams
• work together with the industry and create physical devices

License

Similarly to the RISC-V specs license, the RISC-V Microcontroller Profile specs are also provided free of charge under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, with all rights reserved to Liviu Ionescu.

Unless otherwise mentioned, all other content is also provided free of charge under the terms of the MIT License, with all rights reserved to Liviu Ionescu.