Generating hardware and software for RISC-V cores generated with Rocket Chip generator

This paper presents the hardware/software generation backend of a code generation framework. The backend aims at synthesizing complete systems based on RISC-V cores with accelerators from a single-language description. The framework takes the dataflow description of an algorithm as input and generates a combination of hardware (in Chisel) and software (in C) that interacts with the hardware. The hardware can be integrated with RISC-V cores created by the Rocket Chip generator and the software can be executed on these cores.The generated hardware requires similar amount of resources as the hand-written hardware while achieving equal or higher clock rates. As expected, the accelerators perform the calculations faster than the general purpose processor, 5 to 33x in our experiments. When these accelerators are integrated with the Rocket cores, they increase the performance by 25% and 260% in the two use-cases we investigate