For the past semester (Spring 2021), Alex Lukens and I have been researching Chipyard, a CPU design environment. This tool is designed to bring Agile and CI/CD development practices to the hardware design world. In particular, Chipyard is intended to provide parameterized declaration of RISC-V CPU designs. Chipyard is based on the Chisel domain-specific language. Together, we investigated Chipyard and RISC-V, attempting to determine if such an environment benefits the RISC-V community and its potential uses. Our findings are collected as a introductory-style manual, presented at the end of this post.
RISC-V
To start with, RISC-V is the fifth revision of a RISC ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) specification from the University of California, Berkeley. Some other processors that use RISC designs include: Atmel AVR (used by Arduinos), ARM (used in nearly all mobile devices, including Apple's new Apple Silicon), PowerPC (previously used by Apple), SPARC, and several others. In short, a RISC processor is one where the processor will only access memory to fetch the next instruction, leading to one instruction being executed every CPU cycle. This is in contrast to CISC processors, which typically use many memory accesses to complete an operation. Due to instructions usually taking just one clock cycle on a RISC design, and instructions usually having constant length, allows for many optimizations that can improve performance and/or power consumption.
RISC-V is a somewhat vague term. RISC-V is technically a processor specification with many optional components, allowing for processors to be tailored to particular uses. A RISC-V processor is used to describe a processor that implements the RISC-V ISA. There is also the RISC-V organization which works to further refine and develop the RISC-V ISA standard, ecosystem, and associated resources. Chipyard is an environment to develop accelerators and processors that meet the RISC-V ISA standard.
Chisel
Chisel is a declarative DSL (Domain Specific Language) written and embedded inside Scala. This allows us to parameterize and generate Verilog modules that fulfill the requested purpose without having to handle HDLs (Hardware Description Languages), like Verilog. Because Chisel uses Scala, which depends on the JVM, Chisel can be used on any platform that supports the JVM and associated tools. In addition, because Scala's strict typechecking is used to validate generated designs before being elaborated to Verilog. Chisel forms the backbone of Chipyard, and many other RISC-V components.
Chipyard
Chipyard is a RISC-V development environment, built using Chisel. Because both Chipyard and its dependencies are built using Chisel, the chip designer can declaratively define an accelerator or processor design. In addition, it is designed in such a way that custom circuit HDL and associated Chisel code can be added be added to the ecosystem. This allows for arbitrary extension of Chipyard to meet any particular demand.
Report
This report covers how to set up Chipyard to design and simulate designs, and write them out to an FPGA. It goes into an in-depth discussion of Chipyard's structure and how to work with it. Later sections explore potential uses of RISC-V and Chipyard at Illinois Institute of Technology (Alex's and my university).