Components
This page gives a high-level overview of various components of the RISC-V Atom project.
RISC-V Atom Core
Atom is a 32-bit embedded-class softcore processor written in Verilog HDL. It is designed to cater to embedded class applications. It is fully compliant with the open-source RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (RV32I) and passes all official RISC-V compliance tests. Atom is based on a two-stage pipelined architecture inspired by the ARM cortex m0+ processor. It is aimed towards implementation on FPGAs.
SoC Targets
AtomBones: It is a stub-target that consists of a single atom core only. The instruction memory, data memory, and serial port are simulated in C++. It is should be used for simulation and debugging purposes only.
HydrogenSoC: It is a basic SoC implementation that contains a single Atom core along with instruction memory, data memory, serial ports, GPIO pins, etc. All the peripherals are connected with the CPU using a Wishbone-B4 bus.
AtomSim
AtomSim is a Spike-like simulator written in C++. In contrast to Spike, AtomSim Simulates the actual RTL in the backend. AtomSim provides a hardware-software co-simulation environment for developing applications and extensions on the Atom platform. It uses the Verilator tool to compile the RTL into a shared object which then gets linked with the C++ based simulator frontend to simulate the system. AtomSim also features a command-line interface to control various aspects of the simulation like start, stop, step, run indefinitely, run for a specified number of cycles, enable/disable vcd tracing, etc. It also supports run-time instruction disassembly with the help of the RISC-V objdump tool.
SCAR
SCAR (Search, Compile Assert, and Run) is a processor verification framework written in python. It performs a set of assembly-level tests to verify the processor implementation. Each assembly test usually checks for one particular function of the processor. SCAR does this by examining a state dump after the processor is done with executing a test code. This state dump is then checked assuming a set of assertions in the form of expected register values. These assertions are provided in the assembly file itself. SCAR is also used to verify the RISC-V ISA compliance in this project.
ConvELF
ConvELF is a python script that is used to convert an ELF executable file to verilog friendly memory initialization files. These files can be in either hex or bin format and can be used to initialize a verilog memory with the help of $readmemh & readmemb functions. ConvELF is a flexible program configured by a memory map specified as a python dictionary. It can even fragment an elf file into multiple memory initialization files depending on the memory map provided.