HERO: Heterogeneous Embedded Research Platform for Exploring RISC-V Manycore Accelerators on FPGA

Heterogeneous embedded systems on chip (HESoCs) co-integrate a standard host processor with programmable manycore accelerators (PMCAs) to combine general-purpose computing with domain-specific, efficient processing capabilities. While leading companies successfully advance their HESoC products, research lags behind due to the challenges of building a prototyping platform that unites an industry-standard host processor with an open research PMCA architecture. In this work we introduce HERO, an FPGA-based research platform that combines a PMCA composed of clusters of RISC-V cores, implemented as soft cores on an FPGA fabric, with a hard ARM Cortex-A multicore host processor. The PMCA architecture mapped on the FPGA is silicon-proven, scalable, configurable, and fully modifiable. HERO includes a complete software stack that consists of a heterogeneous crosscompilation toolchain with support for OpenMP accelerator programming, a Linux driver, and runtime libraries for both host and PMCA. HERO is designed to facilitate rapid exploration on all software and hardware layers: run-time behavior can be accurately analyzed by tracing events, and modifications can be validated through fully automated hardware and software builds and executed tests. We demonstrate the usefulness of HERO by means of case studies from our research.