Gazziro, M.; Junior, J.M. de A.; Junior, O.H.A.; Cavallari, M.R.; Carmo, J.P. Design and Evaluation of Open-Source Soft-Core Processors. Electronics 2024, 13, 781, doi:10.3390/electronics13040781.
Gazziro, M.; Junior, J.M. de A.; Junior, O.H.A.; Cavallari, M.R.; Carmo, J.P. Design and Evaluation of Open-Source Soft-Core Processors. Electronics 2024, 13, 781, doi:10.3390/electronics13040781.
Gazziro, M.; Junior, J.M. de A.; Junior, O.H.A.; Cavallari, M.R.; Carmo, J.P. Design and Evaluation of Open-Source Soft-Core Processors. Electronics 2024, 13, 781, doi:10.3390/electronics13040781.
Gazziro, M.; Junior, J.M. de A.; Junior, O.H.A.; Cavallari, M.R.; Carmo, J.P. Design and Evaluation of Open-Source Soft-Core Processors. Electronics 2024, 13, 781, doi:10.3390/electronics13040781.
Abstract
The advantage of FPGAs lies in the 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 implementing I/O in software. With the goal to design and evaluate 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 2mW. Furthermore, it conserves nearly half of the FPGA resources in implementation.
Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
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