Design and Implementation of a RISC-V Based MCU for Automotive Body Control Applications

Abstract

The increasing adoption of Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs) has driven the demand for flexible a nd modular Electronic Control Units (ECUs), including Body Control Units (BCUs) responsible for functions such as lighting, power windows, windshield wipers, and other vehicle comfort features. This work presents the design and implementation of a lightweight 32-bit RISC-V-based prototype Microcontroller Unit (MCU) intended for future automotive body control applications. The proposed architecture is centred on the PicoRV32 processor core and integrates synchronous instruction and data memory, a custom AMBA Advanced Peripheral Bus (APB) bridge, and a General-Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) peripheral within a modular System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture. The complete design was implemented in Verilog HDL and validated through RTL simulation and FPGA implementation on the Terasic DE0-Nano development board. Simulation and hardware results confirmed correct processor execution, APB communication, memory interface operation, and GPIO functionality through the execution of compiled RISC-V firmware. The proposed a rchitecture provides a modular and extensible platform that can be expanded with additional automotive-specific p eripherals f or f uture embedded and automotive body control applications.