RISC-V Summit 2022

Sparrow is a project aiming to build a low-power secure embedded platform for Ambient ML applications. The target platform leverages RISC-V and OpenTitan, and uses the open source Renode simulation framework for pre-silicon co-development of the complete hardware and software solution. Sparrow includes a complex multi-core hardware setup with RISC-V vector instruction support as well as an advanced Rust-based software stack built on top of seL4. Various Renode capabilities have been developed to support the pre-silicon development of Sparrow, including vector instructions support, seL4 OS-aware debugging, ability to use custom, alternative CPU core models as well as various tracing and performance tracking capabilities. The open source simulation-driven development flow used by Sparrow is used to explore tradeoffs and prototype the complete solution including ML software in a continuous integration environment, and can serve as a template for other ML-focused RISC-V silicon projects of this kind.