Design of RISCV processor using verilog

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to develop a 32-bit pipelined processor with several clock domains based on the RISCV (open source RV32I Version 2.0) ISA. To minimize the complexity of the instruction set and speed up the execution time per instruction, a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) processor that uses less hardware than a CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) is used. Furthermore, this paper constructed this processor with five levels of pipelining with the aid of necessary block diagrams, and all of the processes are well described. In this paper, a RISCV processor is designed and simulated using Verilog. The design of the RISCV processor provides an alternative for software and hardware design to the computer designers as it provides free and open instruction set architecture (ISA). Besides, the designed RISCV processor will be using 5-stage pipeline techniques to improve the overall performance of the processor. This system is started by implementing several main modules, such as alu, aludec, maindec, imem, dmem, regfile, pc_mux, result_mux, pipeline register (IF/ID, ID/IEx, IEx/IMem, and IMem/IW), forwardMuxA, and forwardMuxB. Besides, a hazard unit is implemented into the design to mitigate hazard conditions. The functionality of these modules was simulated and verified by using Xilinx Vivado software.