RISC-V Hardware and Software Ecosystem for Computer Architecture Courses

This paper discusses adding C software and periph-eral support for the single-cycle RISC-V RV32I microarchitectures commonly used in computer architecture courses. This allows students to program their processor and communicate with peripherals using the provided library written in C. This paper presents key ideas on how to extend the RV32I microarchitecture to support these peripherals and how to add support for C language in the absence of operating system on the target device. Moreover, a GPIO peripheral was developed to demonstrate the process of adding a peripheral support to the processor and several examples are provided to illustrate the functionality of developed library.