A Custom RISC-V Based SOC Chip for Commodity Barcode Identification

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a crucial component of the contemporary information industry and represents a significant advancement in information technology aimed at enhancing both human productivity and daily existence. Their applications are extensive and far-reaching. However, the present state of research on the design of low-cost IoT SoC chips leveraging open-source instruction set architectures lacks the requisite depth and breadth. To meet the requirements of low-cost IoT system-on-chip (SoC) development, this study presents a commodity code recognition SoC chip based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture, which is capable of performing image acquisition and barcode recognition. The proposed system comprises two main components: a low-power RISC-V processor and an image recognition module. This study initially enhanced the speed, accuracy, and area efficiency of the hardware design of a commodity barcode image-recognition module. Subsequently, the image recognition control module was developed using the RISC-V processor and CMOS image sensor OV7670, and the outcomes of image recognition were accessed through interrupts. The processing speed for collecting and identifying $640\times 480$ images on the FPGA board was 11.4FPS, and the image recognition rate was 99.5%. The chip was taped-out using the UMC55n process, which successfully decoded the barcodes and output the results at a working frequency of 40 MHz.

Keywords

• Barcode
• MPW
• RISC-V
• SoC chip