Designing an SoC is a complex activity which requires a broad range of competences, from computer architecture to low level software development, from system prototyping to operating system. The open-source hardware community has many projects underway with a goal to simplify the whole SoC design and development process by providing high-quality tools, which help automating the workflow, as well as high-quality IP, which helps ensure the SoC design is reliable and efficient.
A great example of such efforts is the recent announcement of Intel Pathfinder for RISC-V, a pre-silicon development environment that supports a broad range of RISC-V cores, such as the OpenHW CORE-V Family, a growing set of complementary IP’s, multiple operating systems, and leading toolchains, all of which are unified within a common IDE and a common set of FPGA platforms. This presentation provides an overview of the OpenHW CORE-V CVA6 64bit core, Intel Pathfinder for RISC-V and will demonstrate how to easily build a Linux capable and feature-rich SoC leveraging this development flow and open-source RISC-V cores.
