CVA5

CVA5 is a 32-bit RISC-V processor designed for FPGAs supporting the Multiply/Divide, Atomic, and Floating-Point extensions (RV32IMAFD). The processor is written in SystemVerilog and has been designed to be both highly extensible and highly configurable.

The CVA5 is derived from the Taiga Project from Simon Fraser University.

The pipeline has been designed to support parallel, variable-latency execution units and to readily support the inclusion of new execution units.

Documentation and Project Setup

For up-to-date documentation, as well as an automated build environment setup, refer to Taiga Project

License

CVA5 is licensed under the Solderpad License, Version 2.1 ( http://solderpad.org/licenses/SHL-2.1/ ). Solderpad is an extension of the Apache License, and many contributions to CVA5 were made under Apache Version 2.0 ( https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 )

Examples

A script to package CVA5 as an IP is available and can be run in Vivado by running source ./examples/xilinx/package_as_ip.tcl. A similar script can be executed afterwords to create a system implementing a small hello world application executing from block memory on the Nexys A7 FPGA.

Publications

C. Keilbart, Y. Gao, M. Chua, E. Matthews, S. J. Wilton, and L. Shannon, “Designing an IEEE-Compliant FPU that Supports Configurable Precision for Soft Processors,” ACM Trans. Reconfgurable Technol. Syst., vol. 17, no. 2, Apr. 2024. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3650036

E. Matthews, A. Lu, Z. Fang and L. Shannon, "Rethinking Integer Divider Design for FPGA-Based Soft-Processors," 2019 IEEE 27th Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM), San Diego, CA, USA, 2019, pp. 289-297. doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/FCCM.2019.00046

E. Matthews, Z. Aguila and L. Shannon, "Evaluating the Performance Efficiency of a Soft-Processor, Variable-Length, Parallel-Execution-Unit Architecture for FPGAs Using the RISC-V ISA," 2018 IEEE 26th Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM), Boulder, CO, 2018, pp. 1-8. doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/FCCM.2018.00010

E. Matthews and L. Shannon, "TAIGA: A new RISC-V soft-processor framework enabling high performance CPU architectural features," 2017 27th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), Ghent, Belgium, 2017. doi: https://doi.org/10.23919/FPL.2017.8056766