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

Processor toaster?

[AlaskanUnderachiever]

That's nothing new. I've been toasting processors for years now. All you need is any AMD chip, a failed heat sink, and 30 seconds of Half Life.

Don't allow whoever designed emacs to get ahold ..

[linzeal]

The damn thing would incorporate circuitry for a garage door opener, a missile guidance system, and would have all 20 megs of emacs stored in microcode.

Amateur chip designers

[ObviousGuy]

Without training and experience in hardware design at the college level, it is doubtful that any amateur could come up with a design that improved on existing chip designs or create a fundamentally new design that would be of interest to chip companies.

The hope springs eternal, though.

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

[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!

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.

/.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.

This type of thing needs to be outlawed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only properly government licensed and monitored programmers and technical people should be allowed to work on such technology as the potential for using this technology to violate the DMCA exists. Anyone who disagrees with this is a terrorist.

GOD BLESS AMERICA

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! :)