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

/.ed allready

[Kizzle]

Since most articles are /.ed as soon as they are posted. I think a great feature for subscribers would be a mirror to each article that is hosted on slashdot.

Re:Amateur chip designers

[Bobzibub]

Replace
'Microprocessor' with 'Operating System'
'Intel' with 'Microsoft'
'AMD' with 'Sun'
....
Read the above comment again. ; )


Building a chip in a fab would have to be a traditional commercial endevour. Agreed. Aren't Boeing and Airbus the only two airline manufacturers because they are subsidized and therefore others cannot compete? Cheers!

FPGA Fun

[CajunArson]

OK, you can reimplement a modern processor core in an
FPGA if you really want to (I can guarentee you that
the FPGA will NEVER run anywhere near as fast as the
regular chip) or you can do what I did for our senior
design project

We used a Xilinx Spartan II to run the main board on a model helicopter control. The idea was that several sensors, including a 2 axis tilt, accelerometers, RF controller and an ultrasonic sonar could be easily integrated into the VHDL core, and then the chip would calculate 4 PWM outputs that drove the 4 motors. While the thing unfortunately didn't fly (weight problems, but hey, we're CompE's not aeros!) the board itself worked
great and the software UART outputted all sorts of fun data about what was going on.

Here's the interesting kicker: The entire system was clocked at a grand total of 1MHz (that's right folks, 1Mhz) and even that was too fast for most of the onboard operations that we internally clock divided. This thing operated all of the components completely in parallel, so there were no interrupts needed at all. The reconfigurability of the FPGA means you can quickly adapt it to solve a whole bunch of specialized problems very efficiently and quickly. This thing definitely met the criterion for a hard realtime system (motor updates within 1ms of a sensor or RF input) and it did it all
via VHDL code, no OS or any high level software needed.

Now obviously this is a very embedded solution and is not extremely flexible, but sometimes you need to step back and look at the true advantages that the hardware provides for you, and use it for something other than reimplementing someone else's CPU core, (of course, that
can be a hell of alot of fun too.... mmm... 21st Century overclocked Trash 80)

PS--> use my spam address: foxcm2000@hotmail.com and
I'll be more than happy to send you all the VHDL we used
to implement the project since I just graduated yesterday! :)