Modular Memory System for RISC-V Based MPSoCs on Xilinx FPGAs

Abstract

Current application domains, like mobile robotics, or internet of things require high computational power associated with low energy consumption. Therefore, MPSoCs are widely used as an adequate platform for high performance embedded computation. Recently, the emergence of RISC-V instruction set architecture drives SoC designers to adopt it in the design of MPSoCs as a cost-free, modular processor and suitable to be implemented in different hardware platforms. Furthermore, these characteristics make the RISC-V an interesting candidate for an FPGA soft-core processor. In this paper, we present a modular hybrid memory system for a lightweight RISC-V based MPSoC architecture. The implementation of the hybrid memory consists of a global scratchpad on-chip shared memory for both instruction and data for the purpose of communication and synchronization between the processing elements. In addition to a tightly coupled memory associated with each processing element for low latency memory access for private computation. Moreover, the complete MPSoC architecture is scalable and configurable, in terms of the number of PEs, shared/private memory sizes and the number of memory mapped peripherals. A benchmarking environment is developed to evaluate the performance of the proposed hybrid memory system in terms of memory access latency and memory bandwidth and their impact on the computation time. The complete MPSoC architecture is implemented and tested on a Xilinx Zynq 7000 FPGA device.