This project targets functional simulation of Vector Processing Units (VPUs). It wraps highly abstracted vector arithmetic functions around a target-specific interface.

Softvector mainly focuses on the RISC-V Vector (RVV) instruction set and was built as a support library for the Extendable Translating Instruction Set Simulator (ETISS).

The CMake project builds a shared library containing generic RISC-V helper/soft functions for the RVV instruction set, i.e. either:

• soft: A high-level implementation including unit test support for SoftVector verification.
• ETISS: Support functions that allow for more efficient and convenient vector computations to be used with the ETISS.

• CMake >= v3.15
• Graphviz + Doxygen (for documentation generation)

Create Build directory:

mkdir build

Change to the created directory:

cd build

Configure the build system. Replace <target> with either ETISS or soft. Statements in [ .. ] are optional:

cmake .. -DTARGET_NAME=<target> -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=`pwd`/installed [-DTEST_BUILD=1]

Build the project:

make

(Build the source file documentation):

make doc

If -DTEST_BUILD=1 was specified and the target supports unit tests (currently only RISC-V soft), the test can be executed with

make test

This tests softvector against a set of 'golden' inputs for the specified target. For RVV soft these are pre-configured vector register files and sample memory vectors which are altered by a SoftVector RVV instruction. The output is compared against the expected states specified in the 'golden' file.

See the separate LICENSE file to determine your rights and responsibilities for using SoftVector.

The documentation is optionally built with SoftVector and can be found in build/doc/html/index.html.