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Wow, not only FPGA-optimized Cortex-M1, they also releases Cortex-M3, one of the most popular MCU IP. BTW, are there many applications integrating a MCU core w
by kbumsik 8y ago
Wow, not only FPGA-optimized Cortex-M1, they also releases Cortex-M3, one of the most popular MCU IP.
BTW, are there many applications integrating a MCU core with FPGA rather than a AP core? I only have seen Xilinx products that uses Cortex-A core.
- monocasa 8y agoIt's not unheard of to throw a soft core in there too, but in the past it'll be something like a Microblaze. An MCU vs. an AP are pretty orthogonal as it's pretty hard to cycle counting real time determinism out of an AP.
- TomVDB 8y agoSuper small CPU cores are fantastic for complex FSM replacement, especially on an FPGA which has unused block RAMs (so using them is essentially free.) I’ve seen cases with relatively complex pure HW FSM being replace by a small CPU and 1KB of RAM where the logic used by the CPU ends up smaller than the FSM. But now the CPU is programmable, so you can iterate much quicker in case of bugs, without the need to reaunthesize. A good example are SDRAM controllers: almost all of them have a small CPU inside the controller that is used for calibration training.
- noselasd 8y ago> BTW, are there many applications integrating a MCU core with FPGA rather than a AP core? I only have seen Xilinx products that uses Cortex-A core. It's common enough that you'll have them available as part of the FPGA toolchain , Xilinx has Picoblaze/Microblaze and Altera has NIOS-II
- vanjoe 8y agoYeah the newer zynq-MP have a 4 core A53 as well as two realtime class cores on there.
- neuromancer2701 8y agoThose are actually silicon hardware cores all of these are soft-core applications.
- xfer 8y agoHere is a ice40 fpga board that uses a cortex-M4 https://www.tindie.com/products/Folknology/blackice-ii https://www.tindie.com/products/Folknology/blackice-ii .