Hi all, I am currently working on an ALU capable of executing vector instructions, and I would like to simulate the whole caravel project (Caravel + my wrapper project). I have seen the files in the dv folder of the caravel repository (https://github.com/efabless/caravel/tree/main/verilog/dv/caravel) but I don't know how to give some instruction to the RISCV processor, and then simulate it with my wrapper project. Could someone help me with it?

Look at these instructions, not the ones in caravel/verilog/dv: https://github.com/efabless/caravel_user_project/blob/main/docs/source/index.rst#section-quickstart . See the section toward the bottom at "Running Full Chip Simulation". The examples like

verilog/dv/io_ports

have C code that you can follow.

io_ports.c

has C code for configuring the GPIO;

la_test1

and

la_test2

have C code for communicating with a project through the "logic analyzer" interface, and

wb_port

has C code for communicating with a project through the wishbone interface.

Hi Edwards, thanks for your quick answer. I checked those files but there aren't any examples of configuring the RISC-V. I want to compare the clock cycles that take the RISC-V to develop 4 adds vs an add using the vector accelerator. So the question is how can I simulate the RISC-V to perform an add or any other function?

All of the simulations like

verilog/dv/io_ports

are simulating the whole chip, including the VexRISC processor. The programs are written in C and compiled into hex code to run on the (emulated) SPI flash. You may need to use an assembler macro in C to ensure that you know exactly how many addition instructions are being executed. If you have compiled from C, you'll have a

.lst

output of the dissassembled code which you can compare against the data being returned from the SPI flash. Be aware that the VexRISC has a very small instruction cache which means that it can run a handful of instructions from memory, but it's hard to know when it's going to run something entirely from instruction cache vs. reading from the SPI flash.

+Thank you, it has been a great help.