Design Your Very Own Microprocessor

LightJockey writes: "CircuitCellar has a great article on designing and building your own microprocessor using FPGAs and openly available processor designs, ranging from ARM and MIPS based to custom designs, and even a couple SPARC based chips, and also a really cool 'processor toaster,' start with a base processor design, and using a webpage to select upgraded components, it spits out the VHDL file you need to create it. Brings garage hackerdom up to a whole new level!"

Comments

Re:Amateur chip designers

[mrm677]

Designing a modern microprocessor can not be done by amateurs or a group of people with a B.S. degrees in electrical engineering. Sure, many of us have taken undergraduate architecture classes and maybe have designed a simple pipelined microprocessor in Mentor Graphics or VHDL/Verilog. Some of us maybe even implemented it with FPGAs.

However, anything close to being as complex as Intel/AMD chips requires an army of highly experienced architects/engineers with many of them having pHD's. Even the software design tools, such as Mentor, cost well over $100,000

Then building the chip is another beast requiring a fab facility in the order of $1 billion for any process with feature sizes smaller than 0.5.

Microprocessors are becoming so complex to design and build, that only a few companies are surviving. Sort of like the aircraft industry. There are only 2 remaining companies in this world that design and build 300+ passenger commercial aircraft (Boeing and Airbus). It is infeasible for a new competitor to arise because of the capital involved (unless of course it is nationally sponsored).

Re:Amateur chip designers

[imnoteddy]

Prototyping can be done much cheaper through MOSIS. If you just want to play with a simple processor (say an 8 bit processor in the 0.5 micron process) you can get in the game for $5,900 US. If you want to play in a 32-bit world, but don't need the hottest process, big onboard cache, etc., consider $15,500 US for 40 parts in a 0.25 micron TSMC process.
In amy case, the real advantage to a roll-your-own processor is not to build a better general purpose processor better than P4/SPARC/ARM/MIPS/PPC but to create a special purpose processor that does the one thing you care most about very well.