Book: RISC-V System-on-Chip Design

Why do you say (no relation) when the authors are exactly the same?

I re-took Computer Architecture recently, and we used their earlier book "Digital Design and Computer Architecture: ARM edition", and it was also excellent.

and the associated github https://github.com/openhwgroup/cvw

Disclaimer up front: I've only read ~10/23 RVSoC draft chapters that were made available as a part of SP2025 E154, so don't take me as any kind of authority on the remaining 13, which I can't wait to get my hands on!

In the preface on xx-xxi:

```

This book took three years of development and another year of production. There are many more important topics in computer architecture and SoC design that were omitted from this edition for schedule reasons; we hope to address them in a future volume:

* Multicore

  * Multilevel cache coherency
  * Synchronization
  * Interprocessor communication

* Microarchitecture

  * Superscalar
  * Out-of-order
  * Deeper pipelines

* RISC-V Extensions

  * Vector
  * Hypervisor
  * Debug
  * Trace

* Verification

  * Functional coverage metrics
  * Hardware emulation

* SoC Design

  * Intellectual property block design and integration
  * AXI interfaces
  * Accelerators
  * Memory controllers
  * Network-on-chip

* SoC Implementation

  * Timing and power optimization
  * Clock gating
  * Clock domain crossings
  * External interfaces

```

It's definitely processor-centric but I wouldn't say "about RISC-V microprocessors" catches it either. The book is certainly structured around the core, but arguably so too is SoC design, at least at an introductory level. RVSoC uses a real SoC design (CORE-V Wally), and each aspect is covered at a length more or less proportionate to the complexity of its implementation in Wally. Admittedly, Wally's peripherals are fewer and simpler than you might find out in the wild. Wally itself is 80-90% core by lines of RTL (horrible complexity metric I know, sorry).

Another way to look at the book is that it picks up where Digital Design and Computer Architecture (by the same Harris and Harris) leaves off. DDCA is used to teach the E85 course at Harvey Mudd; RVSoC is used to teach E154 (SoC design). DDCA builds up to a simplified RV32I-subset pipelined core. If RVSoC started with peripherals without fully elaborating the core, it would leave both readers of both books and students of both courses with a gap in coverage on core design compared to the depth of the remainder of both books.

Both are very detailed. With RVSoC at 859 pages in print and 1135 after the digital supplement, the core-related chapters are not by any means stealing airtime from the other components of the SoC, you could strip out every core-related page and still have a modestly-sized textbook. While not by any means an encyclopedic reference for SoC design, I found it to be a wonderful bridge from more elaborated microarchitecture into SoC.

I hope they are able to get that future volume out!

(edit: quote formatting)

You can get it direct from Elsevier for ~78 euros: https://shop.elsevier.com/books/risc-v-system-on-chip-design...

I just pre-ordered this book and think it's definitely worth it.

Full disclosure: I have no affiliation with the author, but I'm sharing because I genuinely believe in the work.

There's also Modern System-on-Chip Design on Arm textbook by David J. Greaves and it's available as a free download [1].

[1] https://www.arm.com/resources/education/books/modern-soc

I like RISC-V (it's been my job for the last 7 years) but this is nonsense. Not everything RISC-V is good. CLIC was awful (thankfully it has been abandoned). The spec is not especially well written - the style is inconsistent due to being written by many authors, and it is waaaay too much of a textbook rather than a proper spec. (There is some ongoing work to improve this tbf.)

There's a practically unending list of undefined/implementation defined behaviours, which is great if you want to implement an ultra minimal microcontroller with 100 flops, but pretty awful otherwise.

Requiring the C (compressed) extension in the RVA profiles was definitely a mistake. The lack of true 16/64kB pages and conditional moves are probably a mistake (though fixable).

I don't know how any of these make it more robust and mature.

(But to be clear, I still think it's pretty good overall.)