Open-source Hardware: Different Approaches to Softcore implementation

Hiremath, Sneha; Chickerur, Satyadhyan; Dandin, Joel; Patil, M. R.; Muddinkoppa, Bhoomi; Adakoli, Shreerama

doi:10.1109/discover55800.2022.9974836

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Xilinx 7: The 28 nm generation of Xilinx FPGAs remains popular, even after AMD's acquisition and the introduction of two subsequent generations. It is common for soft-core processor implementation projects to make use of the FPGAs manufactured by Xilinx [5]. Cyclone V: The Cyclone family was the low end of Altera FPGAs, with the V generation being the last before Intel's acquisition of Altera.…”

Section: Fpga Familiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design and Evaluation of Open-Source Soft-Core Processors

Gazziro,

Junior,

Junior

et al. 2024

Electronics

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The advantage of FPGAs lies in their ability to implement a fully hardware solution for interfacing with various input/output (I/O) devices. Each block can work in parallel with all the others, simplifying the satisfaction of timing constraints. However, this hardware utilization consumes FPGA resources that could otherwise be allocated to the primary project. An alternative involves employing a small “soft-core” processor to implement I/O in software. With the goal of designing and evaluating a new tiny soft-core processor optimized for FPGA resources in I/O, a novel processor named Baby8 is developed. It is an 8-bit CISC soft-core processor optimized for reduced FPGA resources, including program size for 8-bit applications. The number of instructions is not large, but any instruction can access arbitrary memory locations. The performance and resource utilization of the newly designed processor are evaluated and compared with a variety of other soft-core processors. The results demonstrate its competitive performance, achieving an average maximum clock frequency of approximately 57 MHz and a power consumption of around 2 mW. Furthermore, it conserves nearly half of the FPGA resources in implementation.

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Section: Fpga Familiesmentioning

confidence: 99%