The Rocket Chip Generator
Krste Asanovi´c, Rimas Aviˇzienis, Jonathan Bachrach, Scott Beamer, David Biancolin,
Christopher Celio, Henry Cook, Palmer Dabbelt, John Hauser, Adam Izraelevitz,
Sagar Karandikar, Benjamin Keller, Donggyu Kim, John Koenig, Yunsup Lee, Eric Love,
Martin Maas, Albert Magyar, Howard Mao, Miquel Moreto, Albert Ou, David Patterson,
Brian Richards, Colin Schmidt, Stephen Twigg, Huy Vo, Andrew Waterman
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences Department
University of California
Berkeley, California
April 15, 2016
Abstract
Rocket Chip is an open-source Sysem-on-Chip design generator that emits synthesizable
RTL. It leverages the Chisel hardware construction language to compose a library of sophis-
ticated generators for cores, caches, and interconnects into an integrated SoC. Rocket Chip
generates general-purpose processor cores that use the open RISC-V ISA, and provides both
an in-order core generator (Rocket) and an out-of-order core generator (BOOM). For SoC de-
signers interested in utilizing heterogeneous specialization for added efficiency gains, Rocket
Chip supports the integration of custom accelerators in the form of instruction set extensions,
coprocessors, or fully independent novel cores. Rocket Chip has been taped out (manufactured)
eleven times, and yielded functional silicon prototypes capable of booting Linux.
1 Introduction
Systems-on-chip (SoC) leverage integration and customization to deliver improved efficiency. Rocket
Chip is an open-source SoC generator developed at UC Berkeley suitable for research and industrial
purposes. Rather than being a single instance of an SoC design, Rocket Chip is a design generator,
capable of producing many design instances from a single high-level source. It produces design
instances consisting of synthesizable RTL, and multiple functional silicon prototypes have been
manufactured. Extensive parameterization makes it flexible, enabling easy customization for a
particular application. By changing a single configuration, a user can generate SoCs ranging in
size from embedded microcontrollers to multi-core server chips. Rocket Chip is open-source and
available under a BSD license on Github
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. For increased modularity, many of the component
libraries of Rocket Chip are available as independent repositories, and we use git submodules to
track compatible versions. Rocket Chip is stable enough to produce working silicon prototypes,
and we continue to expand the space of designs it can express with new functionality. This report
briefly catalogues the Rocket Chip features available as of April 2016.
1
https://github.com/ucb-bar/rocket-chip
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