1. Culsans: An Efficient Snoop-based Coherency Unit for the CVA6 Open Source RISC-V application processor
- Author
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Tedeschi, Riccardo, Valente, Luca, Ottavi, Gianmarco, Zelioli, Enrico, Wistoff, Nils, Giacometti, Massimiliano, Sajjad, Abdul Basit, Benini, Luca, and Rossi, Davide
- Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Systems Science - Systems and Control - Abstract
Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) based on cache coherency is crucial for high-end embedded systems like automotive applications. RISC-V is gaining traction, and open-source hardware (OSH) platforms offer solutions to issues such as IP costs and vendor dependency. Existing multi-core cache-coherent RISC-V platforms are complex and not efficient for small embedded core clusters. We propose an open-source SystemVerilog implementation of a lightweight snoop-based cache-coherent cluster of Linux-capable CVA6 cores. Our design uses the MOESI protocol via the Arm's AMBA ACE protocol. Evaluated with Splash-3 benchmarks, our solution shows up to 32.87% faster performance in a dual-core setup and an average improvement of 15.8% over OpenPiton. Synthesized using GF 22nm FDSOI technology, the Cache Coherency Unit occupies only 1.6% of the system area., Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, DSD2024 and SEAA2024 Works in Progress Session AUG 2024; Updated the acknowledgments
- Published
- 2024