Physical Design of UET-RVMCU: A Streamlined Open-Source RISC-V Microcontroller

2026-03-30

AI Summary

This work proposes an efficient methodology for transforming application-grade RISC-V SoCs into lightweight, open-source microcontrollers. Building upon the UETRV-PCore platform, the design streamlines the pipeline, removes the memory management unit (MMU), and integrates GPIO peripherals to yield a low-area RISC-V MCU tailored for embedded systems. The entire physical implementation is carried out using a fully open-source RTL-to-GDS flow based on OpenLane, successfully producing a GDSII layout. This study presents the first complete open-source pathway for converting high-performance SoCs into highly usable and flexible embedded microcontrollers, significantly reducing hardware overhead while preserving functional utility.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Computer Vision: Low Level & Physics-based Vision
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Applications

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Architectures and workflows that use LLMs for crowd work
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Graph embeddings and representation learning for Web-related graphs

Abstract

This paper presents the design and physical implementation of UET-RVMCU, a lightweight RISC-V microcontroller derived from the UETRV-PCore. Aimed at creating an accessible and flexible open-source RISC-V-based microcontroller, UET-RVMCU simplifies the application-class UETRV-PCore by reducing pipeline stages, removing MMU functionality, and integrating GPIO peripherals. The final GDSII layout was generated using an open-source RTL-to-GDS flow (OpenLane). This project demonstrates the feasibility of transforming an application-class SoC into a feature-rich microcontroller suitable for embedded systems, emphasizing low area, design simplicity, and open-source development.

Problem

• RISC-V
• microcontroller
• physical design
• open-source
• embedded systems

Innovation

• RISC-V
• open-source
• microcontroller
• physical design
• OpenLane