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I would like to get into the field of FPGAs a bit. I currently have a PolarFire Everest Dev Board and would like to try something small on it for testing purposes. My current level is very low, i.e. complete beginner. My first working project was a counter that counts binary to 15 and outputs it via the LEDs of the board. Now I wanted to play with RISC-V. Unfortunately I can't find anything on the internet that meets my expectations and almost nothing is "beginner friendly". My current goal is actually just to implement something on the level of a Hello World program in C via the SoftConsole. Unfortunately I have no idea how to go about it. Can anyone help me or recommend a good entry on the internet? Most of the stuff is either unusable, requires licenses I can't get, or is simply no longer available (which happens to me quite often with PDFs from Microsemi).

Since I don't really know what I could do with it to start with, I don't have any code yet that I would like to include. The plan would actually be to create something where I also get feedback via the board that something has been done. Later when I have more understanding SRAMs should be managed with it.

samitxb
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  • How do you want to use C to program FPGA? – 0___________ Feb 05 '23 at 23:25
  • Do you want to flash Risc-V soft-core to the board and "play with it on the beginners level"? The coft-core porcessors are not something "beginner friendly", unless it is is well documented by the FPGA vendor. If you want to try a ready to use Risc-V - get some dev board with a Risc-V cpu. – Flexz Feb 06 '23 at 07:40
  • Hello @0___________, thank you for replaying! I want to use C to programm the RISC-V on the Dev-Board. For the beginning it doesnt really matter what it doas, i only want to learn how to use it. Later it should handle the adressing for two srams on my PolarFire Design. – samitxb Feb 06 '23 at 14:50
  • Hi @Flexz,thx4rplyng! i alrdy have the Everest Dev Board with the RISC-V on it. My problem is that i dont really get it, how i will implement my C-Code in the FPGA Design. My way would be to implement something "ez" at first to get the first steps on starting my project. On that i will build my specific project. But i have already problems by something easy and that makes the next step really hard if i dont get the fundamentals. I expectet something like a roadmap of workflow how i can reach my goal. On top of that comes that i also started short time ago with VHDL. Makes it harder i guess. – samitxb Feb 06 '23 at 14:56
  • Lots of useful demo code here which you can modify to work on your dev board: https://www.fpga4student.com/ – MFerguson Feb 06 '23 at 18:57
  • Hi @MFerguson, thx 4 replying! Unfortunately i already know this site and the closest one i found was the following: https://www.fpga4student.com/2017/04/verilog-code-for-16-bit-risc-processor.html, which not really fits into my expectation :( If i understood that right, i maybe will need a IP-Core for the RISC-V (plus the cores PCIe, AXI4_Interconnect, etc. for the the future project i will reach on) and i guess i need to code the core in C and implement it than, or add the core from catalog and modify it with the written C code. – samitxb Feb 06 '23 at 21:43

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