CV32RT: Enabling Fast Interrupt and Context Switching for RISC-V Microcontrollers

Processors using the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) are finding increasing adoption in the embedded world. Many embedded use cases have real-time constraints and require flexible, predictable, and fast reactive handling of incoming events. However, RISC-V processors are still lagging in this area compared to more mature proprietary architectures, such as ARM Cortex-M and TriCore, which have been tuned for years. The default interrupt controller standardized by RISC-V, the core local interruptor (CLINT), lacks configurability in prioritization and preemption of interrupts. The RISC-V core local interrupt controller (CLIC) specification addresses this concern by enabling preemptible, low-latency vectored interrupts while also envisioning optional extensions to improve interrupt latency. In this work, we implement a CLIC for the CV32E40P, an industrially supported open-source 32-bit microcontroller unit (MCU)-class RISC-V core, and enhance it with
fastirq
: a custom extension that provides interrupt latency as low as six cycles. We call CV32RT our enhanced core. To the best of our knowledge, CV32RT is the first fully open-source RV32 core with competitive interrupt-handling features compared to the Arm Cortex-M series and TriCore. The proposed extensions are also demonstrated to improve task context switching in real-time operating systems (RTOSs).