Modeling RISC-V Processor in IP-XACT

IP-XACT is the most used standard in IP (Intellectual Property) integration. It is intended as a language neutral golden reference, from which RTL and HW dependent SW is automatically generated. Despite its wide popularity in the industry, there are practically no public and open design examples for any part of the design flow from IP-XACT to synthesis. One reason is the difficulty of creating IP-XACT models for existing RTL projects. In this paper, we address the issues by modeling the PULPino RISC-V microprocessor that is written in SystemVerilog (SV) and the project distributed over several repositories. We propose how to solve the mismatching concepts between SV project and IP-XACT, and based on the findings propose improvements for the Kactus2 IP-XACT tool. In addition, the final PULPino model contributes to the rare public non-trivial examples for better adoption of the IP-XACT methodology.