An open-source and GUI-capable RISC-V computer system on a low-end FPGA board

RISC-V is an open and elegant instruction set architecture designed on the lessons learned from history. Since RISC-V requires no license fee and can be available freely, it has been used in broad areas of research, development, and industry. Many processor cores and systems on a chip based on RISC-V have been released, and some are Linux-capable. On the other hand, few stand-alone RISC-V systems on a low-end FPGA can run Linux with various I/Os, such as a network and a display port. If we can design such a system running on a low-cost FPGA board, it will enhance the development of software and hardware related to RISC-V and thus be valuable for numerous purposes. This paper proposes RV-PC, an open-source and GUI-enabled RISC-V computer running as a stand-alone system using a low-end FPGA board. RV-PC supports a wide range of I/Os, such as Ethernet, SD card, VGA display, mouse, and keyboard. It is the unique system that runs GUI and network applications on a system using a RISC-V soft processor on a low-cost FPGA board, such as Nexys A7. The evaluation results show that RV-PC achieves a 1.31 times faster Coremark score than the related work.