{"id":470,"date":"2018-11-16T19:11:50","date_gmt":"2018-11-16T19:11:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/justanotherelectronicsblog.com\/?p=470"},"modified":"2019-04-14T15:08:54","modified_gmt":"2019-04-14T15:08:54","slug":"hello-world-on-the-lichee-tang-risc-v-fpga-board","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/justanotherelectronicsblog.com\/?p=470","title":{"rendered":"Hello World on the Lichee Tang RISC-V\/FPGA board"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Chinese company recently launched a small dev board with some interesting features, it’s one of the very few boards with a RISC-V CPU, like the SiFive HiFive1<\/a>, at least, I though. Unlike the HiFive1 board, the Lichee Tang doesn’t use a custom RISC-V microcontroller, instead it has a FPGA IC with a RISC-V core pre-loaded. This also means it’s possible to use it as an FPGA board, add custom things in the FPGA next to the CPU and so on. And this is just where the interesting tidbits start. Sadly, the documentation currently is mostly in Chinese. So let’s change that and make a hello world project. Meaning, get a toolchain up and running, recompile the FPGA project and load it all on the dev board. Don’t worry, I also created a virtual machine with all the work done already.<\/p>\n

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First a short explanation what RISC-V is and why I think it’s pretty cool. RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture, basicly it’s an open and free to use description on how to build a CPU. This means that anyone can make a CPU based on the RISC-V architecture and use it with no license costs needed. In contrast, with ARM devices, a license fee is in place as the people behind ARM want to earn some money. This means that RISC-V devices can be a bit cheaper, but there are much more advantages. As RISC-V is open, everyone can make a CPU and as long as it’s implemented correctly, compiled code will work on every device. It also means it’s possible to teach CPU design at schools and make something that can actually be used as compilers and such are already existent. Another advantage is that a more open source CPU is possible, as the HDL that makes up the actual CPU can be open source as well.<\/p>\n

Now back to the Lichee Tang, which contains an open source RISC-V CPU inside a Chinese FPGA on a board with a lot of IO. The board has the following:<\/p>\n