DEVELOPMENT OF SOFTCORE PROCESSOR

Mohammed Zaheer, A.M Khan

Abstract: Designing of softcore processor on FPGA is based on software hardware co design. A soft-core processor is a hardware description language (HDL) model of a specific processor (CPU) that can be customized for a given application and synthesized for an ASIC or FPGA target. Embedded Systems which performs specific application using components having hardware and software together is known as embedded system. With hardware design getting complicated day by day, using of software tools for designing the system and testing has made the necessity of today’s technology. Due to the reduced size and greater complexity of hardware models, it requires a higher technological tool for simulation to satisfy the needs of the designers. The more efficient the simulator, complexity in the hardware model can be easily executed in small intervals of time, resulting in design product in a stipulated time intervals. The design of soft core processor system involves strict performance involving area, time, power, cost constraints. Advantages of Softcore processor design improves in design quality reduce integration and test time, supporting growing complexity of embedded system, processor cores, high level hardware synthesizing capabilities, ASIC/FPGA development and platform independence. Xilinx microblaze softcore processor support package allows to create mixed Hardware Software application using micro blaze processor. These processors are called as soft-core processor. Soft IP core of Xilinx micro blaze can be used on series of FPGA.

Keywords: soft-core processor, Xilinx, embedded system

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2015.0424006