Functional Microcontroller Design and Implementation
Vivekananda Jayaram, Subbarao V. Wunnava · 2006
In many situations, hardware description languages (HDL) such as VHDL, Verilog or SystemC is used to develop the functionality of the digital system, wh ile the timing and control signal generation is eit her neglected or ignored. The authors have used a metho dology wherein a hardware structure was conceptually laid out of the digital system under c onsideration. The system development started with t opdown planning approach and the blocks were designed using bottom-up implementation. The programs were written, simulated and synthesized using Elect ronic Data Automation (EDA) tools such as ModelSim and Leonardo Spectrum. Instruction set such as transfer, arithmetic, logic, input, output and control instructions were implemented. This approac h guaranteed the integrity of the system realizatio n with proper timing and data flow, without the invis ible ghost states. In this article, the authors hav e presented the design methodology of such a multi pu rpose microcontroller, and provided the functional HDL code, simulation and synthesis results. Also, the authors have presented the sequence in which th is microcontroller can be made a general purpose contr oller unit which can be used by other system design s.