I’m about to buy a few development board but it makes me confusing. What is the differences between HiFIve1 and Freedom E300 ?
Thanks.
Philip Park
I’m about to buy a few development board but it makes me confusing. What is the differences between HiFIve1 and Freedom E300 ?
Thanks.
Philip Park
Hi Philip,
We are happy to hear that you are interested in SiFive development platforms. HiFive1 is a development board based SiFive’s FE310-G0000 silicon and includes a debugger and flash rom. This is more akin to an Arduino board or other MCU evaluation boards.
The Freedom E300 is a soft IP platform which includes similar processor and peripherals as the FE310-G000. As the Freedom E300 is soft IP, it requires an FPGA development board (Arty) which is the Arty dev kit linked to on our site.
If you are just wanting to program and learn about RISC-V, the HiFive1 is probably the better choice. If you are comfortable with an FPGA flow, and want to learn about the inner workings of a cpu and maybe tweak or add a few peripherals, then the Freedom E300 + Arty is the way to go.
Hello Drew,
Thanks for your reply. Does the HiFIVE1 support Jtag?
Philip
Yes it does, via the FTDI USB interface on the board. It’s programmed from the host PC using OpenOCD, and that’s also how gdb communicates with the CPU.