Tuesday, May 29, 2001

Naohiko Shimizu, School of Information Technology and Electronics, Tokai Univ.: My80, an i8080A instruction compatible processor, implemented in an Altera EPF10K30 or a FLEX EPF6016.

Wednesday, May 23, 2001

Bob Garrett and Martin Won, Altera: PLD solution takes on microcontroller. I take this to be a marketing response to MicroBlaze. "To accommodate both 16- and 32-bit data paths, we chose a 16-bit instruction set, which would lead to a smaller memory footprint and also aligned with the broader availability of low-cost 16-bit flash memories for boot code. This choice also required only one memory access per instruction for both 16- and 32-bit data path implementations of the Nios processor, whereas a 32-bit instruction set would have required two accesses per instruction in a 16-bit data path implementation." That's the same thinking we used for xr16/xr32 and gr0040/gr0050. You can also make a pretty good argument for a 24-bit instruction word architecture. "We wanted the Nios processor to be perceived as a mainstream processor architecture and not a toy for hobbyists. To avoid this type of confusion, we added several sophisticated processor features including a large windowed register file for fast context switching, an integrated and vectored interrupt controller and dynamic bus sizing to accommodate memories that are narrower than the processor data path." Spin. Altera devices do not implement Xilinx's patented LUT RAM feature, and so as I first discussed in Flex10K CPUs and Flex10KE CPUs, because it is impractical to build a small, fast fixed-size register file out of raw flip-flops and muxes, you have little choice but to put register files in block RAMs. In contrast, block-RAM-based windowed, multi-context, and vectored register file options are available to both Xilinx and Altera. To date, both Gray Research and Xilinx have chosen to use small fixed-sized register files, presumably for high clock frequency performance. (Certain windowed and multi-context reg file schemes are interesting in avoiding activation record and context switch memory traffic, though.) Embedded block RAM is just not as fast (and in many cases can be more profitably used for other things, like an I-cache). See also Using block RAM. As for an interrupt controller, as discussed in the Circuit Cellar articles, in a flexible soft CPU core, it is not necessary to fix a specific interrupt discipline: "These artifacts of the fixed-pinout era not be hardwired into our FPGA CPU." And the first FPGA CPU with dynamic bus sizing (to our knowledge) was the 1995 J32, a pipelined 32-bit RISC with an 8/16/32-bit peripheral bus on chip, in an XC4010, which was implemented by a hobbyist. See also SoC On-Chip Buses. Speaking for the community of "toy hobbyist" CPU designers, if I were designing a cost-sensitive embedded system, I'd rather embed a high-clock frequency 180 LUT/0 BRAM 16-bit RISC (or a 270 LUT/0 BRAM 32-bit RISC), than a 1100 LE/several EAB 16-bit RISC (or 1700 LE/several EAB 32-bit RISC). The article is also interesting because (for the first time?) it publicly discloses some features of the Nios instruction set. For instance, we learn that Altera adopts a kind of long-literal immediate prefix instruction, just as our xr and gr families do. Altera, when will you openly publish the Nios instruction set architecture specification? Xilinx, when will you openly publish the MicroBlaze instruction set architecture specification? [updated 05/24/01:] The Altera Nios programmer's reference manual is now available online here (12 MB PDF). Thanks to one of our readers for pointing that out.

Monday, May 14, 2001

Altera: U.S. District Court Reverses Jury Verdict that Altera's FLEX 8000 Products Infringed on Xilinx's Patents. Xilinx: Xilinx to Appeal Judge's Ruling in Patent Case. Previous items.

Sunday, May 13, 2001

Nick Tredennick, DynamicSilicon: The Death of the DSP; Embedded Systems and the Microprocessor -- Beginnings of the Long Downhill for the Microprocessor. BlueArc's SiliconServer appears to be an extremely fast FCCM network filer box, with hardware acceleration of TCP/IP, NFS, FTP, file system, and fibrechannel data transport, using "re-programmable gate arrays". Silicon Server White paper: "all data movement within the SiliconServer architecture is carried out in hardware". George Gilder with Mary Collins, Gilder Technology Report: The Storewidth Warp: "In the BlueArc box, which uses Altera devices, FPGAs perform functions in the spatial domain, such as spatial data flow, that were previously forced to conform to a temporal processor. Altera Apex FPGAs perform all hardware data transport with mere hundreds of CPU MIPS (millions of instructions per second) rather than the thousands consumed by software inside of traditional servers. FPGAs give the Silicon Server a true performance advantage, one that would not have been possible a year ago and will continue to grow over time, as costs continue to decline."

Tuesday, May 8, 2001

New GPL'd FPGA DSP soft core from the University of Valladolid (Spain). Santiago de Pablo writes: "It's a 16-bit fixed-point DSP processor, with precission extended to 24 bits, that can operate (in simulations) at more than 40 MHz (10 MIPS, 10 MACS) on Xilinx Spartan-II FPGAs."

FPGA CPU News, Vol. 2, No. 5
Back issues: Vol. 2 (2001): Jan Feb Mar Apr; Vol. 1 (2000): Apr Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec.
Opinions expressed herein are those of Jan Gray, President, Gray Research LLC.