IndiRA: Design and Implementation of a Pipelined RISC-V Processor

Abstract

The development of Machine Learning and IoT technology requires fast processing. RISC-V is an open-source reduced instruction set-based instruction set architecture, and the processor based on this architecture can be modified accordingly. The base integer instruction extension supports the operating system environment and is also suitable for embedded systems. It is a 32-bit instruction extension and is defined as RV32I. In this paper, we propose a 32-bit integer instruction-based RISC-V processor core. The proposed core has a five-stage pipeline, including the optimized arithmetic and logic unit. The instruction fetch stage is merged with the pre-fetch stage dynamic branch prediction into a two-stage pipeline. The processor is implemented using Verilog HDL, and the resource utilization is verified for FPGA. The results show that the proposed module performs 30% better than the best-performing processor (considering operating frequency) and showed a 17.6% improvement in the proposed core.