As announced at the first annual RISC-V Summit, the RISC-V Foundation honored the winners of the RISC-V SoftCPU Contest for creating innovative FPGA based CPU implementations targeting the RISC-V ISA. Thanks to everyone who participated in the RISC-V SoftCPU Contest! We were excited to see the innovative entries and appreciate your feedback on how we can continue to improve contests in the future.   Congratulations to the winners:

• 1st Place: Charles Papon with VexRiscv was awarded $6,000 USD
• 2nd Place: Antti Lukats with Engine-V was awarded $3,000 USD, a Splash Kit and an iCE40 UltraPlus MDP
• 3rd Place: Changyi Gu with PulseRain Reindeer was awarded $1,000 USD, a PolarFire Evaluation Kit and an iCE40 UltraPlus Breakout Board.
• Creativity Prize: Olof Kindgren with SERV was awarded $3,000 USD

  And a special thanks to the contest sponsors Google, Antmicro, Lattice Semiconductor and Microchip.   A Closer Look at the Winning Entries The first place entry, VexRiscv, was the highest-performance Microsemi implementation and Lattice implementation. Charles’ VexRiscv impressively scaled down, ranking as the third smallest Lattice implementation, while also scaling up to be a Linux capable core. Additionally, the core was selected to be used in Western Digital’s RISC-V Linux Hackathon at the RISC-V Summit! Antti’s Engine-V design was the smallest Microsemi implementation and Lattice implementation, and earned second place in the contest overall. The Engine-V entry used miniscule 306 x 4 input LUTs on the iCE40 UltraPlus MDP, an impressively small number to implement a fully RV32I-compliant implementation. Antii also gets a special shout-out for his excellent support of other participants. PulseRain Reindeer took third place overall. Changyi’s PulseRain Reindeer design ranked second for the highest-performance Microsemi implementation, and third for the smallest Microsemi implementation and highest-performance Lattice implementation. Olof took home the Creativity prize with his bit serial implementation of a RISC-V core. This open source demonstration of doing bit serial with a fully open ISA is a great addition to the ecosystem. Check out his post about the project here.   Honorable Mentions We would also like to recognize the following projects for their innovations: Jörg Mische with Danzig, Matthew Ballance with Featherweight and Frederic Requin with JiVe. Check out Matthew’s write-up about his Featherweight core here.  About the Contest The aim of the contest was to promote innovative vendor-independent, modular and reusable FPGA applications. The participants were challenged to build extremely small, extremely powerful, softcore RISC-V implementations, with additional points awarded for novel approaches to the implementation itself. Designs needed to be a complete FPGA implementation targeting at least one of the two platforms from Microsemi or Lattice, and run the provided Linux Foundation Zephyr RTOS application. The Linux Foundation and RISC-V Foundation recently announced a joint collaboration to accelerate open source development and adoption of the RISC-V ISA. This partnership with the Linux Foundation will enable the RISC-V Foundation to grow the RISC-V ecosystem with improved support for the development of new applications and architectures across all computing platforms. The contest was judged by representatives from Antmicro, Google, Lattice, Microsemi and the RISC-V Foundation.   The Winners’ Scores  

Winner	Points	Prize
Charles Papon with VexRiscv	1st place 131 points	USD $6,000
Antti Lukats with Engine-V	2nd place 130 points	USD $3,000 + Splash Kit + iCE40 UltraPlus MDP
Changyi Gu with PulseRain Reindeer	3rd place 70 points	USD $1,000 + PolarFire Evaluation Kit + iCE40 UltraPlus Breakout Board
Olof Kindgren with SERV	Creativity prize	USD $3,000

 

Scoring Breakdown

Highest-Performance Microsemi Implementation		Points
Charles Papon with VexRiscv		1st place, 50 points
Changyi Gu with PulseRain Reindeer		2nd place, 30 points
Antti Lukats with Engine-V		3rd place, 10 points

 

Smallest Microsemi Implementation		Points
Antti Lukats with Engine-V		1st place, 50 points
Matthew Ballance with Featherweight		2nd place, 30 points
Changyi Gu with PulseRain Reindeer		3rd place, 10 points

 

Highest-Performance Lattice Implementation		Points
Charles Papon with VexRiscv		1st place, 50 points
Jörg Mische with Danzig		2nd place, 30 points
Changyi Gu with PulseRain Reindeer		3rd place, 10 points

 

Smallest Lattice Implementation		Points
Antti Lukats with Engine-V		1st place, 50 points
Frederic Requin with JiVe		2nd place, 30 points
Charles Papon with VexRiscv		3rd place, 10 points

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