General-purpose RISC core has been chosen

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Published: Monday, 07 May 2012 03:20

For prototyping multicore processors on FPGA we’ve been looking for a core, satisfying such requirements as open flexible architecture, GCC compatibility, minimum size on FPGA, 32-bit RISC architecture, perfect 'layout' on Xilinx FPGAs, performance at least 1 DMIPS/MHz.

We’ve been examined more than 10 Soft-processors including Amber, OpenRISC, Plasma, YARI, LatticeMico32, Aquarius, RAMP Gold, LEON3, LEON2, aeMB, ZPU, MB-Lite, Secret-Blaze. We chose the basis for development of general-purpose RISC core - MB-Lite.

The maximum frequency of MB-Lite on Virtex5 is 180 MHz, core size - 1100 6-output LUT, 106 DMIPS (measured using Dhrystone) / 100 MHz and an excellent packing density without performance degradation: up to 20 cores on XC5VLX50T.