Industry Expert Blogs

RISC-V is a powerful instruction set that is constantly evolving. One of the recent evolutions relates to code size reduction. Last year, the RISC-V Zc extensions were ratified. The team at Codasip led this work, and as I have been closely involved, I would like to explain the possibilities of these extensions.

Reducing the code size of your core can have benefits you might not have considered:

Lower system cost

In small embedded systems, the processor’s size is less critical than the size of the Boot ROM and the external flash memory. So, what if you increase the processor size by 1-3% to add functionality for code size reduction? As a result, the code size can shrink by up to 20%. You can fit your software into much smaller ROMs and flash memory, reducing the total system cost despite a modest increase in processor size and power consumption.

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