Perf-V: An FPGA based RISC-V developer board, which costs US$79

RISC-V has long been the thorn in ARM's side, with the UK based chip maker running an anti-RISC V website until employees convinced the company to take it down. RISC-V developer SiFive also recently received US$65.4 million in funding from Qualcomm, while the open source architecture could potentially provide an escape route for Huawei if its US ban sticks.

Hence, now may be a good time to take RISC-V development more seriously. SiFive has its HiFive 1 Rev B development board among others, which received US$47,340 of funding on Crowd Supply in April, and now Chinese-based company PerfXLab has decided to take advantage of the apparent popularity of RISC-V development boards.

Enter the Perf-V, a board that utilises the Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA with 8 MB of FPGA and 8 MB of RISC-V flash storage, along with 256 MB of DDR3 RAM. PerfXLab has also integrated Arduino compatible headers, and JTAG/UART debugging interfaces. The rear of the board has a high-speed connector for Bluetooth, HDMI, VGA and USB 3.0 expansion boards among others according to the Seeedstudio listing.

The Perf-V requires a barrel jack for power and has a host of configurable LEDs including one for power. The board can be programmed with Vivado, while PerfXLab has apparently released an IDE for Windows RISC-V development. The company will also release a Linux compatible version soon, although CNX Software reports that these are only in Chinese.

If you are interested in buying the Perf-V, it is available to order on Seeedstudio for US$79. The board comes with a USB burner/FPGA USB cable and will ship worldwide from June 21.