Studio 7 provides design and productivity tools for RISC-V processors

Studio 7 adds significant new functionality and features, making it the most advanced and effective technology on the market for tailoring RISC-V processors to meet chip designers’ application-specific needs. Codasip engineers have used the Studio design flow to create the broadest portfolio of RISC-V processors in the industry, and they now put the power in the hands of customers to further customise and extend the RISC-V instruction set, based on the requirements of the algorithms being run.

Studio can be used for:

• Processor prototyping for a specific application domain,
• Fast design space exploration,
• Development of custom extensions using Codasip’s architecture description CodAL language.

Studio then generates hardware and corresponding SDKs that are aware of the custom extensions, including:

• Verilog or VHDL RTL and System Verilog UVM environments,
• Testbenches and synthesis scripts,
• Full compiler toolchain including advanced profiling and debugging tools,
• Both cycle-accurate and fast instruction-accurate simulation tools.

Some of the new features included with Studio 7:

• Native support for industry-standard AMBA interfaces, allowing for easy replacement of other processor cores while reusing your existing, proven peripheral IP.
• IEEE 1149-7-compatible 2-wire JTAG to minimise pin-count.
• Improvements in clock-gating for low-power requirements.
• Major updates to Codespace, the optional Eclipse-based IDE, and the underlying software tools, including support for LLVM 5.0.

“Studio 7 is a big step forward for Codasip’s advanced processor creation technology, and will take the guesswork out of implementing the ever-expanding number of ISA options in the RISC-V specification. Studio can help generate processors well-suited to the widest range of application areas, from machine learning inference engines to host processor DSP offload, networking, and storage,” stated Karel Masarik, CEO and co-founder of Codasip. “With Studio 7, there is no need to settle for a one-size-fits-all processor.”