RISC-V System-On-Chip Design fits at the nexus of computer architecture, microarchitecture, and chip design. It is written to be accessible to an advanced undergraduate audience with limited background. It explains concepts from operating systems, VLSI, and memory systems as necessary, and high school mathematics is sufficient preparation for most of the book, although the floating point and division chapters will be primarily of interest to those with a curiosity about computer arithmetic. Like Harris and Harris’s Digital Design and Computer Architecture textbooks, this book will appeal to students with easy-to-read and complete explanations, sidebars, and occasional humor and cartoons.

It comes with an open-source implementation and will include end-of-chapter problems to extend the RISC-V processor in various ways. Ancillary materials include a GitHub repository with complete open-source SystemVerilog code, validation code in C and assembly language, and code for benchmarking and booting Linux.

Ancillary materials include a GitHub repository with complete open-source SystemVerilog code for the fully-functional Wally RISC-V SoC, validation code in C and assembly language, code for benchmarking and booting Linux, labs, slides, exercises, and figures.

• Includes a concrete application & implementation of the open RISC-V architecture
• Explores rarely taught microarchitectural issues:
  • Pipelines, buses, caches, branch prediction, virtual memory, floating-point, cryptography & peripherals
• Illustrates system design with CORE-V Wally, a fully functional RISC-V system-on-chip:
  • Programming & debugging RISC-V in C & assembly
  • SystemVerilog design, debug, verification & synthesis
  • Benchmarking
  • Booting Linux on a simulator & FPGA
• Provides complete open-source code: github.com/openhwgroup/cvw