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SOFT CELL

by Tom Cantrell

Start ý Start Making Sense ý Viva La Difference ý No Free Lunch ý Tool Sweet ý Real Time or Hard Time? ý Small Step, Big Journey ý Sources and PDF

TOOL SWEET

We canýt forget about software tools. That mistake has already been made many times before. There have been proprietary soft-core designs floating around for years, but few have had full-fledged development tool support.

Although it isnýt a best-of-breed tool chain like GNU, ProMic does come with a C compiler, assembler, and simulator (see Photo 1). I donýt have enough information to testify to the pedigree or quality of the compiler, however, the overall package seems easy to use.

The same high-level synthesis approach that makes ProMic portable is exploited in another unique way. Many basic characteristics of the architecture, including data width, instruction, data address spaces, and a number of registers, are programmable for a particular implementation (see Photo 2).

Photo 2ýOffsetting the arguably excessive amount of FPGA logic consumed, ProMic allows you to choose the minimum amount of horsepower required to get the job done.

Tweaking the options is useful during the early development and prototyping phases of a project. When a hardware option is changed, the C compiler automatically generates code for the new implementation (see Listings 1aýc). This allows you to play "what if" by running the code for different versions of the CPU on the simulator to characterize the performance tradeoff.

No processor is an island, so the ProMic full-price package comes with the most popular peripherals including an 8-bit timer, PWM, UART, and I²C interface.

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