Tom Verbeure On The VexRiscV CPU: “A New Way To Design”

Engineer Tom Verbeure has written up an analysis of the VexRiscV CPU, a RISC-V design implemented using the novel SpinalHDL hardware description language (HDL) – an approach he describes as being “as efficient as the most optimized Verilog, yet at the same time extremely configurable.”
First-prize winner in the recent RISC-V Soft-Core CPU Contest, VexRiscV eschews traditional development methodologies in favour of using the novel SpinalHDL language – a Scala library providing hardware primitives which can be connected together. “You have full flexibility to wire together those hardware primitives anyway you want,” Tom explains. “If you have a configuration that doesn’t need JTAG ports, then you just don’t call the Scala function that creates those IO ports. In his analysis of the project, Tom describes VexRiscV as “a complete departure from the traditional way of designing RTL. I found going through the code and figuring out how it all worked fascinating and even entertaining,” he adds. “The VexRiscV is not only amazing in the way its designed, it’s also very high performance for a low amount of resources, with a near infinite amount of configuration options. The difference between a small 0.5 Dhrystone/MHz or a large 1.4 Dhrystone/MHz core is just a few lines of configuration code.”
 
To read more, please visit: https://abopen.com/news/tom-verbeure-on-the-vexriscv-cpu-a-new-way-to-design/.