NoX: a Compact Open-Source RISC-V Processor for Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip

2024/06/25 by Silva, Anderson I., Susin, Altamiro, Kastensmidt, Fernanda L. +2
#Computational Engineering #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Finance #Hardware Architecture (cs.AR) #and Science (cs.CE)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2406.17878

Abstract

IoT applications are one of the driving forces in making systems energy and power-efficient, given their resource constraints. However, because of security, latency, and transmission, we advocate for local computing through multi-processor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs) for edge computing. The RISC-V ISA has grown in academia and industry due to its flexibility. Still, available open-source cores cannot be seamlessly integrated into MPSoCs for a fast time to market. This paper presents NoX, a compact open-source plug-and-play 32-bit RISC-V core designed in System Verilog for efficient data processing in MPSoCs. NoX has a 4-stage single-issue in-order pipeline with full bypass, providing an efficient resource-constrained architecture. Compared to industry and academia resource-constrained RISC-V cores, NoX offers a better resource usage and performance trade-off.

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