Implementation and performance comparison of MMC firmware on RISC-V and ARM-based MCUs

Abstract

The control and data acquisition systems for high energy physics (HEP) applications require a suitable hardware platform to ensure system availability and reliability, so the micro telecommunications computing architecture (MicroTCA) standard is widely utilized in the field of HEP. As a fundamental component of the MicroTCA system, the advanced mezzanine card (AMC) requires efficient module management controller (MMC) to perform board monitoring and management. Therefore, the real-time responsiveness of the module management controller is crucial. Presently, most existing MMC solutions implemented on microcontroller chips with commercial architecture cores such as AVR and ARM. The open-source and customizable RISC-V instruction set architecture has gained widespread attention and adoption due to its advantages such as simplicity, modularity, scalability, low power consumption, and efficiency. In this study, we successfully implemented a MMC solution based on the RISC-V core microcontroller GD32VF103, and evaluated the real-time performance of MMC on both the GD32VF103 and the ARM-based STM32F100 through hot swap response time testing. The results reveal real-time performance of the firmware on the GD32VF103 chip compared to the STM32F100 chip, exhibiting a notable speed improvement of approximately 61.4%. Thus, RISC-V architecture chips exhibit significant potential as MMC solutions within MicroTCA systems.