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CORE WAR

by Tom Cantrell

Start ý Guns Blazing ý The Curtain Rises ý RISC 101 ý 32 Bits orBust ý There's the Bell • Sources and PDF

THE CURTAIN RISES

But, it takes a lot more than a press release and marketing pitch to run code (see Figure 1).

According to Xilinx, the standard $495 MicroBlaze Development Kit will include the MicroBlaze core, a standard set of peripherals, and the GNU development tools and documentation. A more expensive kit (not priced yet) will also include a Virtex-II based EV board and the Xilinx Foundation tool chain that allows you to cobble together your own SoC.

Oh yeah, $495 also buys you a license to use the core in as many projects as you want, as well as allowing you to ship any number of units. That is, of course, presuming that the core is running in a Xilinx FPGA. An interesting question for both Altera and Xilinx is what if someone gets to the point (e.g., 100k+ units) where theyýd like to migrate their design into an ASIC?

I was tempted to hold off on writing about MicroBlaze until I could get everything in hand. But, in this era of Internet time, it seems more appropriate, arguably even mandatory, to provide the play-by-play as the story unfolds.

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