Design of RISC-V CPU for 100 Gbps Network Application

Abstract

As a new open-source reduced instruction set architecture, RISC-V has advantages of low power consumption, small area and high performance. Therefore, technology and products based on RISC-V are developing rapidly. However, currently there are few medium and high end 64 bit CPU design instances based on the RISC-V archi-tecture, and it is also hard to find corresponding commercial IP, especially for high-speed network applications. In this paper, we firstly improved the open source 64 bit U500 RISC-V SoC by extending the Bus width and adding L2 Cache, and etc. Secondly we implemented a complete 100 Gbps Ethernet function, which includes MAC, PCS, and SerDes, and the TX buffer and RX buffer used for the function. Finally we proved correctness and ef-fectiveness of entire 64 bit RISC-V CPU design and 100 Gbps Ethernet function by simulation, FPGA verification and boot of Linux operation system. The designed RISC-V CPU and 100 Gbps Ethernet function can be applied to data center application such as smart network interface cards.