A RISC-V based SoC for blockchain data integration in IoT edge devices

The widespread growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has significantly increased the need for robust data interaction mechanisms, making data security a critical challenge. Blockchain technology, characterized by its decentralized architecture, presents an innovative solution for managing data within IoT ecosystems. A collaborative cloud-edge framework emerges as a dependable option for deploying IoT blockchains; however, energy-efficient hardware support on the edge remains insufficient. To resolve this issue, this study introduces a low-power System on Chip (SoC) integrated with a specialized secure coprocessor to handle data on-chain processes. To mitigate physical-level security risks, the SoC incorporates a trusted computing architecture based on dual RISC-V cores. Experimental results using an FPGA platform reveal that the proposed SoC achieves a 12.1-fold performance enhancement for complete data on-chain processing tasks compared to the high-performance Intel i9-13950HX CPU, with total power consumption limited to just 0.579 W.