neorv32 VS chipyard

Compare neorv32 vs chipyard and see what are their differences.

neorv32

:rocket: A tiny, customizable and extensible MCU-class 32-bit RISC-V soft-core CPU and microcontroller-like SoC written in platform-independent VHDL. (by stnolting)

chipyard

An Agile RISC-V SoC Design Framework with in-order cores, out-of-order cores, accelerators, and more (by ucb-bar)
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neorv32 chipyard
77 5
1,415 1,411
- 3.2%
9.9 9.7
2 days ago 2 days ago
C C
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

neorv32

Posts with mentions or reviews of neorv32. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-08.

chipyard

Posts with mentions or reviews of chipyard. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-27.
  • Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Dec 2023
    It's probably true that Chisel isn't right for industry -- Google tried it too for the TPU project and eventually went back to Verilog. That said, I think it's main win is that it is great from a research / open-source perspective.

    Taking advantage of the functional nature of Chisel enables a set of generators called Chipyard [0] for things like cores, networking peripherals, neural network accelerators, etc. If you're focusing on exploring the design space of one particular accelerator and don't care too much about the rest of the chip, you can get a customized version of the RTL for the rest of your chip with ease. All the research projects in the lab benefit from code changes to the generators.

    Chisel even enables undergraduate students (like me!) to tape out a chip on a modern-ish process node in just a semester, letting Chisel significantly reduce the amount of RTL we have to write. Most of the remaining time is spent working on the actual physical design process.

    [0]: https://github.com/ucb-bar/chipyard

    [1]: https://classes.berkeley.edu/content/2023-Spring-ELENG-194-0...

  • A repository that tracks upstream but allows separate tracking.
    1 project | /r/git | 3 Apr 2023
    The repo in question is chipyard: https://github.com/ucb-bar/chipyard
  • Ao486_MiSTer: i486 core for the MiSTer FPGA gaming system
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Mar 2023
    Many companies do just write entire modern SoCs in straight Verilog (maybe with some autogenerated Verilog hacked in there) with no other major organization tools aside from the typical project management stuff. The load-store unit of a modern CPU alone easily exceeds 10k lines of Verilog. It's a similar thing as people who work with kernels—after all, the page table management code in a modern operating system like Linux is absolutely monstrous but still people are able to understand it well enough to be able to make the changes they need and get out.

    If you are interested in other languages which hope to make this sort of stuff easier, I'd recommend taking a look at design productivity languages like Chisel and it's associated Chipyard [1], SpinalHDL [2], and Bluespec [3]. Each of these are meant to make defining extremely complex hardware more manageable for humans and there's a lot of interesting work going on right now with each of them.

    [1] https://github.com/ucb-bar/chipyard

    [2] https://github.com/SpinalHDL/SpinalHDL

    [3] https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc

  • Chipyard: An Open Source RISC-V SoC Design Framework
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Dec 2021
  • How to use a RISC V core for other purposes?
    2 projects | /r/RISCV | 8 Jun 2021

What are some alternatives?

When comparing neorv32 and chipyard you can also consider the following projects:

VexRiscv - A FPGA friendly 32 bit RISC-V CPU implementation

rocket-chip - Rocket Chip Generator

linux-on-litex-vexriscv - Linux on LiteX-VexRiscv

vivado-risc-v - Xilinx Vivado block designs for FPGA RISC-V SoC running Debian Linux distro

picoMIPS - picoMIPS processor doing affine transformation

riscv-boom - SonicBOOM: The Berkeley Out-of-Order Machine

upduino-projects - Various VHDL projects I've worked on for the Upduino v2.0 and v3.0

RVVM - The RISC-V Virtual Machine

lxp32-cpu - A lightweight, open source and FPGA-friendly 32-bit CPU core based on an original instruction set

nuclei-sdk - Nuclei RISC-V Software Development Kit

fpga-zynq - Support for Rocket Chip on Zynq FPGAs

shecc - A self-hosting and educational C optimizing compiler