RISC-V AMS VP: An Open Source Evaluation Platform for Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

Recently, Virtual Prototypes (VPs) implemented in SystemC TLM (Transaction-Level Modeling) have been introduced into the growing RISC-V ecosystem to facilitate early software development and testing. However, accurate environment modeling, which is crucial for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), has been mostly neglected to this point. Thus, in this paper, we propose the RISC-V AMS VP framework, that combines an existing open source RISC-V VP with the SystemC AMS (Analog/Mixed Signal) environment modeling style to obtain a RISC-V evaluation platform tailored for CPS. As a case study we created a temperature control system that integrates a sensor and heater component together with a control software. Moreover, we present results on an exemplary fault-injection evaluation that is enabled by bringing together software, hardware and environment models in our unified RISC-V AMS VP framework. Finally, we provide the RISC-V AMS VP framework together with the temperature control system as open source to stimulate further research and as foundation for educational purposes.