Building A Custom System-On-A-Chip

Only a few years ago, we could only dream about building our very own custom microprocessor system on a chip. The manufacturing cost for producing a custom chip is just too prohibitive for a hobbyist or even for a small company. However with programmable logic devices (PLDs) getting larger in capacity and cheaper in cost, it is now very easy to design and produce even a fairly complex microprocessor with all the whistles and bells that you would expect to have in a current day microprocessor in a single PLD. In addition, you can even include all the necessary peripheral components to create an entire system on a single chip. To top it all off, advances in the development software for building microprocessors and integrating system components together is getting to a point where you don’t even need to know about the details of how to put a microprocessor together, or how the different components are connected together. That’s right, you don’t need to know the difference between the datapath and the control unit, or even between an AND gate and an OR gate. All you need to know is what kind of features you want to have in your custom microprocessor and the entire system. You only need to tell the “wizard” that you want this and that, and almost like magic you will have not just the custom microprocessor, but together with all the other system components interfaced correctly, not on a silver platter, but on a PLD.