RISC-V Extension for Optimized PWM Control

This paper proposes a RISC-V extension, named SigWavy, meant to optimize the PWM control for general purpose or application specific designs. The RISC-V extension named above is a PWM Control Unit with a dedicated ISA extension set designed for configuring and driving up to 32 PWM signals. The extension is integrated into RiscPwm, an updated version of our previous work, the RisCanFd SoC, for taking advantage of CAN-FD, a massively used protocol in the areas of automation and mobility. Being configured with the dedicated ISA extension or with parameters directly extracted from CAN-FD commands, the proposed solution manages to configure/reconfigure PWM channels between 4.79x and 9.18x times faster than an ARM Cortex-M7 processor, although our SoC operates with a 6x lower frequency.