Ibex Demo System

This an example RISC-V SoC targeting the Arty-A7 FPGA board. It comprises the lowRISC Ibex core along with the following features:

• RISC-V debug support (using the PULP RISC-V Debug Module)
• UART
• GPIO
• PWM
• Timer
• SPI
• A basic peripheral to write ASCII output to a file and halt simulation from software

Install dependencies and activate our environment

git clone [email protected]:lowRISC/ibex-demo-system.git
cd ibex-demo-system


## Native Python Environment

```bash
# Setup python venv
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

# Install python requirements
pip3 install -r python-requirements.txt

You may need to run the last command twice if you get the following error: ERROR: Failed building wheel for fusesoc

Building Software

C stack

First the software must be built. This can be passed to a verilator simulation model to be simulated on a PC.

mkdir sw/c/build
pushd sw/c/build
cmake ..
make
popd

Building Simulation

The Demo System simulator binary can be built via FuseSoC. From the Ibex repository root run:

fusesoc --cores-root=. run --target=sim --tool=verilator --setup --build lowrisc:ibex:demo_system

Running the Simulator

Having built the simulator and software, to simulate using Verilator we can use the following commands. <sw_elf_file> should be a path to an ELF file (or alternatively a vmem file) built as described above. Use ./sw/c/build/demo/hello_world/demo to run the demo binary.

Run from the repository root run:

# For example :
./build/lowrisc_ibex_demo_system_0/sim-verilator/Vtop_verilator \
  --meminit=ram,./sw/c/build/demo/hello_world/demo

# You need to substitute the <sw_elf_file> for a binary we have build above.
./build/lowrisc_ibex_demo_system_0/sim-verilator/Vtop_verilator [-t] --meminit=ram,<sw_elf_file>

Pass -t to get an FST trace of execution that can be viewed with GTKWave.

Simulation statistics
=====================
Executed cycles:  5899491
Wallclock time:   1.934 s
Simulation speed: 3.05041e+06 cycles/s (3050.41 kHz)

Performance Counters
====================
Cycles:                     457
NONE:                       0
Instructions Retired:       296
LSU Busy:                   108
Fetch Wait:                 20
Loads:                      53
Stores:                     55
Jumps:                      21
Conditional Branches:       12
Taken Conditional Branches: 7
Compressed Instructions:    164
Multiply Wait:              0
Divide Wait:                0