The MPACT Tools portfolio provides open-source tools that increase the velocity of HW-SW co-design and development of RISC-V based systems.

MPACT-Sim [1] is an ISS framework in C++ that makes it easier to create ISSs from scratch, and supports rapid changes in response to ISA design changes or user-needed functional enhancements. Using DSLs to describe the instruction set and encoding, it automatically generates instruction decoder source, and provides support for generating assemblers and disassemblers. MPACT-Sim enables rapid HW/SW co-design and early pre-Silicon software development.

MPACT-RiscV [2] (built using MPACT-Sim) is a highly configurable RiscV ISS, with an interactive command interface for assembly level debugging and a customizable assembler which generates both relocatable and executable output files.

To demonstrate the practical impact of the MPACT ecosystem, we present the real-world case study of the CoralNPU machine learning core [3], which is focused on development and execution of ML kernels. The CoralNPU-MPACT ISS [4] development was significantly accelerated by leveraging the fundamental MPACT-Sim and MPACT-RiscV infrastructure, requiring only limited modifications to support the additions to the CoralNPU's instruction set and memory access rules.

The CoralNPU UVM testbench [5] captures every retired instruction via the standardized RISC-V Verification Interface (RVVI) and steps the MPACT ISS model using a SystemVerilog DPI bridge. The testbench then retrieves golden reference values from the model to verify equivalence against the CoralNPU RTL, detecting functional bugs during development.