There are several FPGA use cases where a softcore processor is beneficial to the overall solution. These can include anything from performing simple communication and configuration of IP cores using AXI Lite to complex GUI control and network management and security.
We have looked at many different processor types over the years, but we have never looked at a RISC-V implementation until today. In this blog, we are going to examine the newly released Bluespec RISC-V MCU which implements the RV32IM instruction set and provides the 32-bit RISC-V instruction and a hardware multiply / divide.