Survey of RISC-V Pipelines and Testers

RISC-V is an open-source Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that is becoming a popular ISA with many Fortune 500 companies like Google, Intel, NXP, Nvidia, Red Hat, and Samsung are adopting this instruction set. An open-source ISA that does not require a license allows for innovation across the industry as the barrier to accessing the ISA has been removed. There are many innovations covered in this paper where researchers have created different length pipelines from as low as a three-stage pipeline for passive IoT (Internet of Things) devices to a twelve-stage pipeline design for supercomputer applications. Additionally, we also looked at various testing methods to verify RISC-V architecture and ensure that it would be free of faults. Overall with the new innovation that is taking place for RISC-V, RISC-V will likely come into the mainstream in the next few years.