Nonmetal Platforms

Chips based on the Nonmetal group are designed for embedded tasks. They always come without MMU and are designed for Zephyr RTOS.

Platforms are ordered by atomic number, which reflects their capability tier. Each platform is a strict superset of the one before it.

Feature Overview

All platforms use a VexiiRiscv CPU. Higher-tier variants add caches, branch prediction, and wider execution pipelines for increased performance.

CPU

	Hydrogen	Carbon	Nitrogen	Oxygen	Phosphorus	Sulfur
I-Cache		✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
D-Cache			✓	✓	✓	✓
Branch prediction			✓	✓	✓	✓
Dual-issue					✓	✓
FPU						✓
Privilege levels	M	M	M+U	M+U	M+U	M+U

RISC-V Extensions

	Hydrogen	Carbon	Nitrogen	Oxygen	Phosphorus	Sulfur
M (multiply/divide)		✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
A (atomics)				✓	✓	✓
F (single-precision FPU)						✓
D (double-precision FPU)						✓
C (compressed)		✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Zba/Zbb/Zbc/Zbs (bit manipulation)				✓	✓	✓
Zicbom (cache-block management)				✓	✓	✓
Zicsr	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Zifencei	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓

Every platform includes on-chip SRAM and boots from external SPI Flash in XIP mode. HyperRAM is available starting with Nitrogen. Tightly-coupled memory is planned.

Memory

	Hydrogen	Carbon	Nitrogen	Oxygen	Phosphorus	Sulfur
On-chip SRAM	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
TCM				TBD	TBD	TBD
SPI Flash XIP	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
HyperRAM			✓	✓	✓	✓

Simpler variants use a shared bus, while higher-tier platforms switch to a crossbar for better throughput. Starting with Phosphorus, the memory side of the crossbar is 64 bits wide by default (32 to 128 bits); the peripheral bus stays 32 bits wide on every platform.

Interconnect

	Hydrogen	Carbon	Nitrogen	Oxygen	Phosphorus	Sulfur
Shared bus	✓	✓
Crossbar			✓	✓	✓	✓
Memory bus width	32 bit	32 bit	32 bit	32 bit	64 bit	64 bit

A DMA controller is available starting with Oxygen.

DMA

	Hydrogen	Carbon	Nitrogen	Oxygen	Phosphorus	Sulfur
Channels				4	4	4

All platforms include a PLIC for interrupt handling.

Interrupt Controller

	Hydrogen	Carbon	Nitrogen	Oxygen	Phosphorus	Sulfur
PLIC sources	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓

JTAG debug is available on every platform. Higher-tier variants add trace support for real-time instruction tracing.

Debug

	Hydrogen	Carbon	Nitrogen	Oxygen	Phosphorus	Sulfur
JTAG	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Trace				TBD	TBD	TBD

Hydrogen and Carbon run on a single clock domain. Advanced power management for higher-tier platforms is planned.

Power

	Hydrogen	Carbon	Nitrogen	Oxygen	Phosphorus	Sulfur
Clock domains	1	1	4	4	4	4

Performance

CoreMark 1.0, measured on FPGA with the port in software/<soc>/coremark. Scores are dominated by memory and ISA rather than by the pipeline: Hydrogen has no instruction cache and no hardware multiply, so every fetch is a SPI flash transaction and every multiply a libgcc call. Carbon adds both, which accounts for almost all of its advantage. Nitrogen’s further gain comes from the data cache, branch prediction and HyperRAM, and is much smaller because the core is no longer starved for instructions.

CoreMark

	CoreMark/MHz	Iterations/s	Clock	ISA	Executed from
Hydrogen	0.005	0.24	50 MHz	rv32i_zicsr_zifencei	XIP flash
Carbon	1.590	79.48	50 MHz	rv32imc_zicsr_zifencei	XIP flash
Nitrogen	2.360	70.80	30 MHz	rv32imc_zicsr_zifencei_zicntr_zihpm	HyperRAM
Oxygen	2.419	72.56	30 MHz	rv32imac_zicsr_zifencei_zicntr_zihpm_zba_zbb_zbc_zbs_zicbom	HyperRAM
Phosphorus	3.149	94.47	30 MHz	rv32imac_zicsr_zifencei_zicntr_zihpm_zba_zbb_zbc_zbs_zicbom	HyperRAM
Sulfur

Built with GCC 14.3.0 and -O2 -march=<isa> -mabi=ilp32, MEM_METHOD=MEM_STACK, iterations auto-scaled so every run exceeds the ten seconds EEMBC requires. The ports have no floating point, so CoreMark’s own Iterations/Sec line is computed from a truncated whole-second time; the figures above are derived from the raw tick count and timer frequency that portable_fini() prints.

Nitrogen additionally reports mcycle and minstret, giving 423,714 cycles and 313,653 instructions per iteration, an IPC of 0.74. Its cycle count matches the machine timer to seven digits, confirming that the CPU and the timer share one clock.

Oxygen runs the same pipeline and memory system, so its 2.5% gain over Nitrogen comes from the bit manipulation instructions alone: 302,672 instructions per iteration (3.5% fewer) in 413,473 cycles, an IPC of 0.73. Atomics and the DMA controller do not affect CoreMark, which has no atomic operations and no bulk transfers in its timed loop.

Phosphorus executes the same 302,672 instructions per iteration as Oxygen, so its 30% gain comes from the pipeline and the memory system alone: dual issue, the 64-bit memory bus and the 512 B GShare bring an iteration down to 317,571 cycles (23% fewer), an IPC of 0.95. Of that, the larger GShare accounts for 1.6% fewer cycles than the 256 B table of Oxygen.

See the available platforms for detailed specifications and usage instructions.

• ElemRV-H (Hydrogen)
  • Specifications
  • Memory Map
  • Peripherals
  • Interrupts
  • Pinmux
  • Board Targets
• ElemRV-C (Carbon)
  • Specifications
  • Memory Map
  • Peripherals
  • Interrupts
  • Pinmux
  • Board Targets
• ElemRV-N (Nitrogen)
  • Specifications
  • Memory Map
  • Peripherals
  • Interrupts
  • Pinmux
  • Board Targets
• ElemRV-O (Oxygen)
  • Specifications
  • Memory Map
  • Peripherals
  • Interrupts
  • DMA
  • Pinmux
  • Board Targets
• ElemRV-P (Phosphorus)
  • Specifications
  • Memory Map
  • Interconnect
  • Peripherals
  • Interrupts
  • DMA
  • Pinmux
  • Board Targets
• ElemRV-S (Sulfur)
  • Specifications
  • Memory Map
  • Floating point
  • Interconnect
  • Peripherals
  • Interrupts
  • DMA
  • Pinmux
  • Board Targets