A survey of open source processors for FPGAs

Author

Rui Jia ; Lin, Colin Yu ; Zhenhong Guo ; Rui Chen ; Fei Wang ; Tongqiang Gao ; Haigang Yang

Author_Institution

Syst. on Programmable Chip Res. Dept., Inst. of Electron., Beijing, China

fYear

2014

fDate

2-4 Sept. 2014

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

6

Abstract

FPGA-based SoCs have been gaining great favors among traditional applications and expanding the application domains to some new areas. Reusing and sharing components is an attractive and pratical methodology for system designers to reduce the design complexity of the SoC architectures. Open source hardware has become an effective method of improving the design productivity. As the core functional component, processors affects the performance of SoC systems. This paper investigates existing open source processors, and gives an overview. From the points of usability and stability, the main features of open source processors are summarized. Following these features, some open source processors with high usability and stability are selected. These open source processors and existing vendor-provided soft processors are implemented on Stratix V and Virtex-7 FPGAs using corresponding EDA tools, Quart us n and ISE. The implementation results are compared and discussed.

Keywords

electronic design automation; field programmable gate arrays; public domain software; system-on-chip; EDA tools; FPGA-based SoC; SoC architectures; Stratix V FPGA; Virtex-7 FPGA; core functional component; open source hardware; open source processors; vendor-provided soft processors; Field programmable gate arrays; Java; Licenses; Multicore processing; Reduced instruction set computing; Registers;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), 2014 24th International Conference on

Conference_Location

Munich

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/FPL.2014.6927482

Filename

6927482