RISC-V Assembly Language Programming

A Short Course

6 June to 8 June 2025

[The course will now start on 6th June, not 5th June]

Mode of delivery: Online only

Instructor: Prof. Sparsh Mittal, IIT Roorkee

Motivation

NOTE: We have sent the joining link with all the registered participants. If you have registered, but not received the joining link, please contact Prof Sparsh (sparsh.mittal@ece.iitr.ac.in)

RISC-V is an open-source, license-free ISA. It is suitable for a broad range of computing system, from microcontrollers to high-end computing systems. RISC-V has recently seen an exponential adoption. For example, more than 10 billion chips containing RISC-V cores had shipped by the end of 2022. RISC-V organization envisions RISC-V technology being integrated into a staggering 16 billion chips by 2030. The RISC-V SoC market is forecast to grow to $92.7B by 2030 at a CAGR of 47.4%. In 2023, RISC-V was chosen as one of the 10 breakthrough technologies by MIT Technology Review. An entire laptop based on RISC-V ISA was recently designed. Even in India, there have been many efforts to adopt RISC-V. For example, MeITY has started the Digital India RISC-V (DIR-V) programme to design indigenous chips. RISC-V adoption can enable India to shift from a services nation to a product nation.

RISC-V has seen rapid industry adoption. Qualcomm and Google have announced they are building their next-generation wearables on the open-source RISC-V architecture. Meta has already designed RISC-V chips to run AI frameworks for its Facebook and Instagram services. RISC-V architecture is now being used by companies like Nvidia, Apple, Google, Oculus, Qualcomm, Rambus and others for IoT devices to supercomputers, smartwatches and autonomous vehicles. Google, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Red Hat, and Samsung activated the RISE project, which was formed to accelerate software development for RISC-V architectures. Finally, Semiconductor industry players Robert Bosch GmbH, Infineon Technologies AG, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP Semiconductors, and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., have come together to jointly invest in a company aimed at advancing the adoption of RISC-V globally by enabling next-generation hardware development.

Comparison between different ISAs

About the Course and Target Audience

IIT Roorkee is offering a short-course on "RISC-V assembly language programming". This course will first provide a background on (user-mode) assembly languages in general and RISC-V in particular. Then, it will discuss various RISC-V instructions, such as arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) and comparison instructions, logical instructions, conditional instructions, memory access instructions. The course will then cover the concepts of stacks and function-handling and apply these ideas to implement functions. Encoding of RISC-V instructions and datapath design will also be discussed. Throughout the course, several examples will be presented on converting C/C++ codes to RISC-V assembly language code. The total duration of the course would be 10 hours spread across 4 days and will include hands-on training using RIPES simulator.
Target audience
- This course will be useful for all (BTech/MSc/MTech/PhD) students, teachers, and engineers working in the fields of electronics and electrical engineering, and computer science particularly those interested in system design, compiler design, computer architecture and organization.
- This course will also be useful for executives, engineers, or researchers from private and government organization including R&D laboratories interested in system and chip design.

Course Instructor

Dr. Sparsh Mittal is currently working as an associate professor in the ECE department at IIT Roorkee. He is also a joint faculty at Mehta Family School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at IIT Roorkee. He received the B.Tech. degree from IIT, Roorkee, and the Ph.D. degree from Iowa State University (ISU), USA. He has worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL), USA. He has received best paper awards or honorable mentions at AIMLSystems, VLSID and ICPR conferences. In 2024, he was shortlisted in the list of top-5 faculty members in IIT Roorkee for the excellence in teaching award based on students' feedback. His research has been funded by SERB and Semiconductor Research Corporation (USA). He has served as a reviewer, TPC member or track chair at prestigious conferences and journals. He has published more than 130 papers at top venues and has nearly 9500 citations.

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About the Institute

The Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee has an illustrious history and a glorious past. It has its foundation as the Thomson College, which was founded in 1847, to train technical manpower for construction of Ganga canal. It was the first Engineering College in the then British Empire. In The year 1949, this great institution was accorded the status of the first technological university of independent India and was renamed as University of Roorkee. On September 21, 2001, the Government of India declared it as the Nation’s seventh Indian Institute of Technology.

About the CONTINUING EDUCATION CENTRE (CEC)

CEC offers a platform for the professionals and officials to relearn the fundamentals and the advances made in the cutting-edge science and technologies. It helps the professionals to unlearn the obsolete and to acquire the advanced knowledge from the experts and peers in different areas. The courses are offered in varied and flexible formats and are led by faculty of this Institute into various Departments and Centers. Experts from industries and R & D organizations may also be invited to interact with the participants.