Interfacing the ?-VEX with the µBlaze processor
M. De Zeeuw · Research Repository (Delft University of Technology) · 2011
Developments in reconfigurable platforms result in constantly increasing available area and improving technology. These improvements allow embedded systems to implement increasingly complicated systems. As a result the performance gap of processors build on FPGA technology compared to Semi-custom ASIC technology is decreasing. The down side of these developments is the increasing complexity in designing an embedded system, and the longer development tracks that result from this complexity. In this thesis, we design and implement a flexible platform aimed for ease of use whilst offering significant speed-up compared to a General Purpose Processor based system. As a basis for our platform we have taken the MOLEN Polymorphic Processor. By combining a General Purpose Processor with custom accelerators only parts of an application have to be implemented in custom hardware to gain considerable speedup. We aim to decrease the implementation effort further by using a VLIW processor as accelerator in the MOLEN system. Specifically the Xilinx MicroBlaze processor is used as host processor and the r-VEX VLIW processor is used as the accelerator. The r-VEX processor offers parametrization of many of its aspects, such as the issue width and logic organization. As a result of the parametrization a r-VEX processor can be implemented that meets the applications specific requirements.