RV16: An Ultra-Low-Cost Embedded RISC-V Processor Core

Embedded and Internet of Things (IoT) devices have extremely strict requirements on the area and power consumption of the processor because of the limitation on its working environment. To reduce the overhead of the embedded processor as much as possible, this paper designs and implements a configurable 32-bit in-order RISC-V processor core based on the 16-bit data path and units, named RV16. The evaluation results show that, compared with the traditional 32-bit RISC-V processor with similar features, RV16 consumes fewer hardware resources and less power consumption. The maximum performance of RV16 running Dhrystone and CoreMark benchmarks is 0.92 DMIPS/MHz and 1.51 CoreMark/MHz, respectively, reaching 75% and 71% of traditional 32-bit processors, respectively. Moreover, a properly configured RV16 running program also consumes less energy than a traditional 32-bit processor.