Building Open-Source Embedded Ecosystem around Shakti Processor

Abstract

The VLSI market has been growing exponentially in a couple of years starting from the Manufacturing technology node to the capability of fulfilling application-centric processing needs at the customer/user level. In the VLSI market, some big players have taken place for their domain and application markets, where the startups are not able to come up with products in the market due to all proprietary hardware/software, technologies, and tools. But after the release of the RISC-V open-source ISA, many individual developers, designers, and startups worked on new ideas and solutions to modern problems in real life. Due to RISC-V ISA, the open-source community has built up and come up with open-source resources and platforms in the VLSI market. As only Open-source ISA will not be sufficient to build products for the market, because from specifications to the manufacturing end product startup/company needs the tools, platform architecture, different IPs, and many more which all are proprietary due to monopoly in the market. This situation can only be solved by an open-source community. The RISE group from IIT-Madras has come up with an initiative to build an open-source processor named “Shakti Processor”. A group has proposed a couple of classes (cores) in Shakti for specific needs in the market starting from small IoT products to HPC (High-Performance Computing), from single-core to multiple cores on the same chip. The author has an idea to build an Embedded Ecosystem around Shakti Processor to fill the huge gap between the Core/SoC to the Software Developer via using all available alternative open-source tools, Software, toolchains, and libraries in the market. This thesis covers various software setup and their integration to work in the same flow as Proprietary software/toolchains and compilers to generate industry-standard output to work. We have successfully developed and showcased the project of Embedded Ecosystem including SoC creation from existing Shakti C-Class Core, Mimic of NIRMA SoC on Emulation Environment QEMU & Renode, Custom Linux Guide, Software development for custom architecture, and RTOS porting on QEMU.