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ASIC roundup of open source RISC-V CPU cores

2022/01/18 Oguz Meteer // guztech


While waiting for simulation results for my final paper, I thought I’d synthesize and do place & route of several open source RISC-V CPU cores for fun. Some basic information:

These results are just for fun and to give a very rough estimation of what could be achieved when implemented as an ASIC. There is no SoC, no interconnect, no SRAM, no off-chip memories, etc. so take these results with a mountain of salt. Still, I think it is interesting to see how cores meant to run primarily on FPGAs map onto an ASIC.

Also, since I went for the maximum clock speed, it increases the area quite a bit. To squeeze the last bit of performance out of a design, the usage of buffers shoots up, which increases area and power usage. So this choice negatively impacts cores that are optimized for area in a more disproportionate manner.

TL;DR

Core Instruction set Max. Freq. (MHz) Die area (mm^2)
SERV RV32I 1020 0.029584
PicoRV32 RV32I 806 0.0425152
Minerva RV32IM 625 0.051076
Hazard3 RV32I 435 0.037401
Hazard3 RV32IMZbaZbbZbs 400 0.05211128
FemtoRV32 (quark)) RV32I 741 0.02964884
FemtoRV32 (petitbateau) RV32IMFC WIP WIP
VexRiscv (min) RV32I 606 0.04276588
VexRiscv (IMAG) RV32IMAC 526 1.17332208
Misato RV32I 667 0.04652624
Misato (sky130) RV32I 75 0.25

SERV (RV32I, RV32IM, RV32Zicsr)

The award-winning SERV CPU by Olof Kindgren is a bit-serial RISC-V CPU that is focussed on being as minimal as possible. It may not be the fastest CPU, but it is the (barely) smallest RISC-V CPU in this roundup (the other is the FemtoRV32-quark found further down in this post). Here, I used SERV version 1.1.0 with the default configuration (RV32I).

SERV v1.10

PicoRV32 (RV32E, RV32I, RV32IC, RV32IM, RV32IMC)

The excellent size-optimized PicoRV32 CPU by Claire Xenia Wolf is not only a very flexible core, but it’s also the first formally verified RISC-V CPU! The default configuration was used (RV32I).

PicoRV32

Minerva (RV32IM)

The Minerva CPU by Lambda Concept is a configurable, 6 stage RISC-V CPU written in Amaranth HDL which is a hardware description language written in Python. The default configuration was used (RV32IM, no I$ / D$).

Minerva

Hazard3 (RV32I + M, C, A, Zicsr, Zba, Zbb, Zbc, Zbs)

The Hazard3 CPU core by Luke Wren is a 3-stage RISC-V processor that also supports a bunch of optional extensions. Two different versions were used (both use hazard3_cpu_1port).

RV32I

Configuration

Hazard3

RV32IMZbaZbbZbs

Configuration

Hazard3

(WIP) FemtoRV32 (RV32I, RV32IM, RV32IM, RV32IMC, RV32IMFC)

The FemtoRV32 CPU core by Bruno Levy is part of his learn-fpga teaching material for FPGAs and processor design. Two different versions were used: quark (RV32I) and petitbateau (RV32IMFC). Important to note is that both versions don’t use a standardized interface.

Quark (RV32I)

FemtoRV32-quark

Petitbateau (RV32IMFC)

FemtoRV32-petitbateau

VexRiscv

The VexRiscv CPU core by Charles Papon is an award-winning core that is written in SpinalHDL which is also being developed by him. It is one of the most flexible and best performing RISC-V implementations, capable of being able to run Linux. It is used by default in LiteX. Two different configurations were used: min (RV32I) and IMAC (RV32IMAC).

VexRiscv (min)

VexRiscv (min)

VexRiscv (IMAC)

VecRisc (IMAC)

Misato (RV32I)

The Misato core developed by me is written in Amaranth HDL and currently does not use a standardized interface (I am working on adding a Wishbone interface). It is very bare bones, but parts of it are formally verified. Currently, the core does require a single cycle instruction and data memory for it to work correctly. It is a work in progress, but I wanted to include it anyway.

Misato

SkyWater 130 nm version

Olof Kindgren added FuseSoC support for Misato, which means it can now also be built with the SkyWater 130 nm PDK!

Misato


If you have questions and/or constructive criticism, let me know on Twitter @BitlogIT