Welcome!

This page aims at providing an educational introduction to the design of a pipelined processor hardware based on the RISC-V instruction set. Knowledge about the underlying instruction set and basic concepts of RISC-V is helpful to understand the content.
Ideally you use this website supplementary to a computer architecture lecture, as this website was originally designed for this purpose.
The content elaborates on concepts covered by Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition: The Hardware Software Interface. This website focusses on visualizing the fundamental elements of the processor datapath and pipeline. It further tries to convey the reasoning behind design decisions of a RISC-V processor, specifically when it comes to hazard handling.

Structure
The content is divided in chapters. You can navigate through them using the navigation at the top of the page or by following the links on the bottom of every page linking to the next and previous chapters. In some of the chapters you find exercises and annotations, highlighted in boxes.

This website was developed as part of a Master's project in collaboration with the Computer Architecture Chair at Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg, aimed at supporting the teaching of the Computer Architecture lecture.
  1. Patterson, D. A., & Hennessy, J. L. (2021). Computer organization and design RISC-V edition: The hardware software interface (2nd ed.). Morgan Kaufmann.