Advanced Environment Modeling and Interaction in an Open Source RISC-V Virtual Prototype

Abstract

RISC-V is a modern Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that by its open nature in combination with a clean and modular design has enormous potential to become a game changer in the Internet of Things (IoT) era. Recently, SystemC-based Virtual Prototypes (VPs) have been introduced into the RISC-V ecosystem to lay the foundation for advanced industry-proven system-level use-cases. However, a VP-driven environment modeling and interaction has been mostly neglected in the RISC-V context. In this paper we propose such an extension to broaden the application domain for virtual prototyping in the RISC-V context. As foundation, we build upon the open source RISC-V VP available at GitHub. For visualization purposes of the environment we designed a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and designed appropriate libraries to offer hardware communication interfaces such as GPIO and SPI from the VP to an interactive environment model. Our approach is designed to be integrated with SystemC-based VPs that leverage a Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) communication system to prefer a speed optimized simulation. To show the practicability of an environment model, we provide a set of building blocks such as buttons, LEDs and an OLED display and configure them in two demonstration environments. Our evaluation with three different case-studies demonstrates the applicability of our approach in building virtual environments effectively and correctly in matching the real physical systems. To advance the RISC-V community and stimulate further research we provide our extended VP platform with the environment configuration and visualization toolbox as well as both case-studies as open source on GitHub as well.