CVA6: An application class RISC-V CPU core

The goal of the CVA6 project is create a family of production quality, open source, application class RISC-V CPU cores. The CVA6 targets both ASIC and FPGA implementations, although individual cores may target a specific implementation technology. The CVA6 is written in SystemVerilog and is heavily parameterizable. For example parameters can set the ILEN to be either 32- or 64-bits and support for floating point can be enabled/disabled.

CORE-V Nomenclature

CORE-V is the name of the OpenHW Group family of RISC-V cores. CVA6 is the name of a GitHub repository for the source code for a set of application class CORE-V cores. The CV prefix identifies it as a member of the CORE-V family and the A6 indicates that it is an application class processor with a six stage execution pipeline. However, the CVA6 “as is” is not intended to implement a specific production core. Rather, the CVA6 is expected to be the basis for a number of application class cores. The naming convention for these cores is:

CV <ILEN> <class> <# of pipeline stages> <product identifier>

Thus, the CV64A60 would be a 64-bit application core with a six stage pipeline. Note that in this example, the product identifer is “0”.

Organization of this Document

This documentation is split into multiple parts.

The CVA6 User Guide provides a detailed introduction to the CVA6. This document is based on the original Ariane documentation and is aimed at hardware developers integrating CVA6 into a design.

The CVA6 Requirements Specification is the top-level specification of the CVA6. One of the key attributes of this document is to specify the feature set of specific CORE-V products based on CVA6. This document focuses on _what_ the CVA6 does, without detailed consideration of _how_ a specific requirement is implemented. The target audience of this document is current and existing members of the OpenHW Group who wish to participate in the definition of future cores based on the CVA6.

The CVA6 Design Document describes in detail the CVA6, the code base that can be used to compile/synthesize a specific core instance (e.g. cv32a6).

The CV32A6 Design Document describes in detail the CV32A6, a specific core based on the CVA6 and the first production quality 32-bit application processor derived from the CVA6. The primary audience for this documentation are design and verification engineers working to bring the CV32A6 to TRL-5.

The CVA6 APU describes an Application Processor Unit built around the CVA6.