YOU NEED
RISC-V IS NOT RISC-V
MORE THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS
QUICK TIP
QUICK TIP
ALTERNATIVE IDES…
Credit: www.gigadevice.com
GigaDevice GD32VF103 RVSTAR
OUR EXPERT
Tam Hanna has seen the embedded space inside and out. His multidecade work has involved coding games for early mobile phones, designing metrology systems, and various projects for private clients.
RISC-V is a catch-all term encompassing multiple architectures. Our GigaDevice GD32VF103 RVSTAR is 32-bit RISC-V Core, which is optimised for control applications and does not have functionality such as an MMU required for advanced operating systems.
The instruction-set architecture decisions discussed in the previous boxout (page 67) are not the only problem faced by chip designers. Creating a microcontroller requires more than just the compute element – in particular, various peripheral-device building blocks need to be licensed or provided.
Should you seek to deploy your RISC-V design in a sanctionscritical environment, seek specialised legal advice early. US trade sanctions tend to bubble up the value chain with surprising effects – a thoughtless purchase using US dollars can, for example, put the entire project in jeopardy.
Breadboarded circuits suffer from limited reliability due to connection problems. We consider this design to be close to the practical limit of breadboarding – any larger, and a printed circuit board (available for next to nothing from the usual suspects) has a lower TCO.
We’re using NucleiStudio. It is based on Eclipse CDT, so developers will be familiar with the way the various user interface elements work, and will find advanced functions such as a powerful debugger.
Buckle in kids, this isn’t a project for the fainthearted or novice electronic tinkerer. Before B we can deal with the RISC-V hardware, we need to deal with our software development environment. Visit www.nucleisys.com/download.php and right-click Nuclei Studio IDE > Linux x86-64 to start the download – the servers are not particularly fast, so the process will take a bit of time. After that, untar the archive and start it in a terminal, as follows:
2x Large Breadboards
This should not be considered indicative of the RISC-V standard as a whole. Various options are available, permitting chip designers to customise the compute core to their needs. Eliminating unnecessary functionality leads to smaller (and cheaper) die sizes; lower power consumption is achieved by the smaller number of transistors.
Their job is, for example, the provisioning of an I2C acceleration engine or the GPIO transceivers enabling the microcontroller to communicate with the outside world and any attached circuitry.
This, however, is not the only development environment available for the GigaDevice GD32VF103 microcontroller. One exotic, but free, product is Embeetle. It sports a unique IDE design and is based on makefiles – the amount of graphical configuration is minimised and environments can easily be transferred from one machine to another.
$ cd ~/Downloads/NucleiStudio
100x jumpers