Synthesis of Steel-ASIC, a RISC-V Core

Abstract

It is presented the design flow of an ASIC version of STEEL, a RISC-V microprocessor developed at UFRGS. The microprocessor core called STEEL implements the RV32I and Zicsr instruction sets of the RISC-V specifications. The whole process entails logical and physical synthesis, using the X-Fab 180 nm, which relies on the Cadence EDA framework. The ASIC circuit operates with a maximum frequency of 19.61 MHz and the estimates obtained from the physical synthesis indicates a power consumption of 10.09 mW.