A Pluggable Vector Unit for RISC-V Vector Extension

Abstract

Vector extensions have become increasingly important for accelerating data-parallel applications in areas like multimedia, data-streaming, and Machine Learning. This interactive presentation in-troduces a microarchitectural design of a vector unit compliant with the RISC- V vector extension v1.0. While we targeted a specific core for demonstration, CVA6, our architecture is designed so as to ensure extensibility, maintainability, and re-usability in other cores. Furthermore, as a distinctive feature, we support speculative execution and precise vector traps. The paper provides an overview of the main motivation, design choices, and implementation details, followed by a qualitative and quantitative discussion of the results collected from the synthesis of the extended CVA6 RISC-V core.