Introduction to FPGA Part 11 - RISC-V Softcore Processor | Digi-Key Electronics

A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit (IC) that lets you implement custom digital circuits. You can use an FPGA to create optimized digital logic for things like digital signal processing (DSP), machine learning, and cryptocurrency mining. Because of the FPGA’s flexibility, you can often implement entire processors using its digital logic. You can find FPGAs in consumer electronics, satellites, and in servers used to perform specialized calculations. In this series, we will see how an FPGA works and demonstrate how to create custom digital logic using the Verilog hardware description language (HDL). Previously, we looked at how setup and hold time violations can cause metastability. In this episode, we build a RISC-V softcore processor for our FPGA and write a simple C test program for it. Note: you will need Linux to follow along! I did everything on a Raspberry Pi 4, but any Debian-based flavor (e.g. Ubuntu) should work. The solution to the challenge at the end of the episode c