Open Architectures (RISC-V) as Demo Platforms for Electronic Design Teaching

This paper presents the convenience of adopting open source tools and architectures in digital electronics training, along the whole training path, starting from the most basi
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structures (combinational and sequential circuits) to the design of complex systems, such as a microprocessor/microcontroller, either through the description of its block-based architecture, or through the use of hardware description languages (HDL). In this line, we demonstrate the possibility of achieving a viable prototype of a simple RISC-V processor fully compatible with the execution of compiled code using a standard RISC-VISA (Instruction Set Architecture) toolkit.