RISC-V is interesting for Lattice ECP5 specifically. I'm working on a project now where I'm using it (I will make a blog or videos about it at some point): -

RISC-V is interesting for Lattice ECP5 specifically. I'm working on a project now where I'm using it (I will make a blog or videos about it at some point): - ECP5 is the lowest cost medium size FPGA. Usually I would say that using a soft core is a waste of money vs. an external microcontroller unless you need to save space, but the cost of the added gates (say the next larger FPGA size than what you would need for a design without the soft core) is less than the cost of a microcontroller for the case where you are using ECP5 and you need video (a non-video micro is still cheaper). - Mico32 is Lattice's soft core solution. You can argue about its quality, but the very stupid reason that I prefer RISC-V is that the Mico32 tool chain does not work in Ubuntu (or at least not without a lot of work- it is supposed to work in RedHat). A lot of other people complain about Mico32 because it will not run Linux, but this is not so much of an issue for my design. - PicoRV32 is designed for high clock speed. This is probably not good for its own performance (multiple cycles per instruction), but it does mean that the RISC-V core is not the limiting factor for the rest of your FPGA design. https://github.com/cliffordwolf/picorv32 https://github.com/cliffordwolf/picorv32 - The barrier to entry is low (as long as you already know GCC linker scripts). The problem with NIOS-II and especially Xilinx Microblaze is that the their tools are not simple. There is a payoff for learning their tools, in that a lot of vendor cores become available. But if you don't need the vendor cores, then the non-existent toolchain (there is no system building to learn) for RISC-V is better. An example of this is the following project trellis (a cool open source FPGA toolchain, but that's another story) example design: https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjtrellis/tree/master/examples/picorv32_versa5g https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjtrellis/tree/master/examples...