vivado-risc-v VS picorv32

Hello. I'm looking into implementing RISC-V on an FPGA for a school project. The two repos I'm looking into using are the Ariane and RocketChip repos. Both look actively maintained, but RocketChip has more recent releases, and it's used by this other repo that creates a block design in Vivado with the RISC-V RTL. However, we would also like to be able to make changes to the core, and I'm afraid that scala/Chisel might be difficult to learn. Ariane looks like SystemVerilog while RocketChip is mostly Chisel. Does any have recommendations on which RISC-V repo would be good to use for a project?

For Xilinx FPGAs : https://github.com/eugene-tarassov/vivado-risc-v

I know it would run slowly, im not interested in performance, just curious about fpga capabilities. I found the following project where apparently they instantiate a Rocket chip core and are able to run debian on it. Unfortunately there are no demo images or video, and i dont own a xilinx board, so i dont know what the system is capable of doing. Could one install a lightweight desktop environment or install packages using apt?

But to save time, since you already have the Eugene Tarassov repo working running linux, you could look into modifying the bootrom for your needs. For example, you could take out all the stuff about loading files from SD card etc. and just include kprint.h and the bare minumum you need to print out over UART.

> Right now, most devices on the market do not support the C extension

This is not true and easily verifiable.

The C extension is defacto required, the only cores that don't support it are special purpose soft cores.

C extension in the smallest IP available core https://github.com/olofk/serv?tab=readme-ov-file

Supports M and C extensions https://github.com/YosysHQ/picorv32

Another sized optimized core with C extension support https://github.com/lowrisc/ibex

C extension in the 10 cent microcontroller https://www.wch-ic.com/products/CH32V003.html

This one should get your goat, it implements as much as it can using only compressed instructions https://github.com/gsmecher/minimax

In contrast to most people here saying you NEED to spend money. I disagree with that. You can implement and simulate a SPI master/slave fully on your computer, no FPGA or other hardware required. There are simulation models for SPI peripherals you could use. For example: https://github.com/YosysHQ/picorv32/blob/master/picosoc/spiflash.v

The Pico RV32 is pretty small, and can go as low as about 750 LUTs, with most features elided. I don't know how Xilinix LUTs translate to Lattice though.

Picorv32: https://github.com/YosysHQ/picorv32

There are loads of free RISC-V cores that you can read the source of and run on cheap FPGAs. Take a look at PicoRV32: https://github.com/YosysHQ/picorv32

picorv32 is written in Verilog.

In short: it works, though the implementation lacks the crystal clarity of FemtoRV32 and PicoRV32. The core is larger than SERV but has higher IPC and (very arguably) a more conventional implementation. The compressed instruction set is easier to expand into regular RV32I instructions than it is to execute directly.

That is, reducing the number of LUT required to implement a CPU of a given ISA.

A basic RV32 CPU is down to 500-700 LUT.

    https://github.com/YosysHQ/picorv32

I've bought a cheap FPGA board (Sipeed Tang Nano 9K) because I want to implement a little 8 or 16-bit CPU. The FPGA has plenty of BRAM for such a little CPU, so I wouldn't even need to implement an SPI controller initially, but I want to implement a von Neumann architecture, and was wondering if the only way of doing so using single port (or semi dual port) RAM would be to use 2 cycles or more for memory transfer operations (one for loading the instruction, one for executing the actual memory transfer), or if there was any technique that could be used to avoid this without having to implement instruction-level parallelism. Even if not, references to understandable code implementing a simple memory interface would be appreciated. I looked at PicoRV32 but couldn't really understand its inner workings.

Have you looked at PicoRV32? https://github.com/YosysHQ/picorv32