Design of a Portable and Customizable Microprocessor for Rapid System Prototyping

Due to the increasing number of processors which are integrated in System On Chips (SOCs) the need for robust, highly configurable processors emerged. Preliminary research showed that commercial processors are not suited for many research projects due to the fact that they are closed source and they can not be modified. Open source processors on the other hand appeared to be of too low quality. Within this thesis a light-weight instruction and cycle compatible implementation of the MicroBlaze architecture called mb-lite is presented to fill the need for a fast, reliable processor suitable for Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and semi-custom implementation. This was accomplished by using a proven design methodology and using high-level VHDL abstractions. Experimental results showed that mb-lite is able to obtain much higher performance than existing open source processors, while using very few hardware resources. mb-lite can be easily extended with existing Intellectual Property (IP) components due to a wishbone bus adapter and a modular, easily configurable multiplexed memory bus. All components are thoroughly tested for compliance, and their functionality was proven to be correct using timing back-annotated simulations. Continued work on mb-lite will focus on including the design in a reconfigurable fabric as well as fabrication in a 90 nm semi-custom Integrated Circuit (IC) technology. Design of a Portable and Customizable Microprocessor for Rapid System Prototyping