Teaching IP Core Development: An Example

The increasing gap between design productivity and chip complexity, and emerging systems-on-a-chip (SoC) have led to the wide utilization of reusable intellectual property (IP) cores. Educators’ responsibility is to provide future generations of SoC architects with knowledge necessary for successful design and use of IP cores, and to offer them a system perspective including both hardware and software. One way to accomplish this goal is through projects focused on soft CPU cores development. In this paper, we show the design flow and give the details of one such project aimed to develop a Microchip’s PIC18 microcontroller core and implement it on an FPGA.