History

CVE2 development started in 2015 under the name “Zero-riscy” as part of the PULP platform for energy-efficient computing. Much of the code was developed by simplifying the RV32 CPU core “RI5CY” to demonstrate how small a RISC-V CPU core could actually be [1]. To make it even smaller, support for the “E” extension was added under the code name “Micro-riscy”. In the PULP ecosystem, the core is used as the control core for PULP, PULPino and PULPissimo.

In December 2018 lowRISC took over the development of Zero-riscy and renamed it to Ibex. In 2023 the OpenHW Foundation forked Ibex and renamed the fork CVE2.

References

1. Schiavone, Pasquale Davide, et al. “Slow and steady wins the race? A comparison of ultra-low-power RISC-V cores for Internet-of-Things applications.” 27th International Symposium on Power and Timing Modeling, Optimization and Simulation (PATMOS 2017)