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Publication

Advanced Virtual Prototyping for Cyber-Physical Systems using RISC-V: Implementation, Verification and Challenges

Vladimir Herdt; Rolf Drechsler
In: Science China Information Sciences (SCIS), Springer, 2021.

Abstract

Virtual Prototypes (VPs) are crucial in todays design flow. VPs are predominantly created in SystemC TLM (Transaction Level Modeling) and are leveraged for early SW development and other system-level use cases. Recently, virtual prototyping has been introduced for the emerging RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and become an important piece of the growing RISC-V ecosystem. In this paper we present enhanced virtual prototyping solutions tailored for RISC-V. The foundation is an advanced open source RISC-V VP implemented in SystemC TLM and designed as configurable and extensible platform. It scales from small bare-metal systems to large multi-core systems that run applications on top of the Linux operating system. Based on the RISC-V VP, this paper also discusses advanced VP-based verification approaches and open challenges. In combination, we provide for the first time an integrated and unified overview and perspective on advanced virtual prototyping for RISC-V.