| Popis: |
The extraordinary infrastructure needed to operate any computer in general takes several years to develop and requires intensive capital investment. Hence, only large companies can afford to build systems using processor cores, leaving small but very innovative companies out of this game. It is possible to license processor cores from providers such as ARM but this is still too expensive for many small enterprises. This problem is slowly but effectively being addressed in the open source community by making available, free of charge, high quality hardware and software components which innovative companies can use to assemble complex systems. After a few attempts to create an open source processor and surrounding ecosystem, the RISC-V free instruction set architecture has emerged in full force and inspired a new wave of hope that the problem is finally going to be solved. This paper presents both a methodology for creating systems on chip (SoCs), using RISC-V cores, and a base open source SoC called Warpbird, which it is claimed here to be the first untethered SoC of its kind. An experimental evaluation of the open source components used and of the system itself is provided. |
