Publication
Virtual Prototype driven Design, Implementation and Evaluation of RISC-V Instruction Set Extensions
Milan Funck; Vladimir Herdt; Rolf Drechsler
In: 25th IEEE International Symposium on Design and Diagnostics of Electronic Circuits and Systems (DDECS). IEEE International Symposium on Design and Diagnostics of Electronic Circuits and Systems (DDECS-2022), April 6-8, Prague, Czech Republic, 2022.
Abstract
RISC-V is a modern open source Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and designed in a very extendable manner, which allows for highly application specific solutions. However, the identification of suitable instruction set extensions usually requires a significant manual effort and therefore is a very challenging process. In this paper we propose a lightweight alternative methodology to find suitable application-specific RISC-V extensions, using a Virtual Prototype (VP). This is done, purely by observing the used instructions during the execution of the targeted application on the VP. Therefore, no further information about the application itself are needed. In this context the advantages and the flexibility of a VP and the straightforward extendability of the RISC-V ISA are demonstrated.