Simply-V: A RISC-V Reconfigurable Playground Soft-SoC for Open Hardware Research and Fast Prototyping

The recent rise of open hardware, mainly driven by the momentum of the RISC-V ecosystem, has sparked significant innovation in the development of open-source CPUs and SoCs. This movement has enabled broad exploration across academia and industry, fostering collaboration and reuse. However, the diversity and openness that empower this space also introduce challenges: academic projects often fall short of industry-grade robustness, lack of standardization, and simulation limitations. To ease the work of researchers some key challenges must be faced in open hardware development: platforms’ reconfigurability, ease of integration of third-party IPs, and support for technological heterogeneity. To address these issues, we present Simply-V, a flexible, FPGA-based soft-SoC platform designed for rapid prototyping and open hardware research. Simply-V enables plug-and-play support for multiple CPUs, IPs and accelerators, offers structured configurability across embedded and highperformance profiles, and supports the integration of both RTL and HLS-based components. We demonstrate the SoC’s capabilities through platform-fair CPU benchmarking and the iterative development of HLS-designed convolutional accelerators, showcasing simplified fast prototyping, configurability, and heterogeneous IP support on real hardware. Simply-V is openly available at https://github.com/HiSA-Team/Simply-V.git.