Engineering:OpenPower Microwatt
| General Info | |
|---|---|
| Launched | 2019-08-29[1] |
| Designed by | IBM, OpenPOWER Foundation |
| Architecture and classification | |
| Application | Soft core |
| Instruction set | Power ISA 3.0 ppc64le |
| Physical specifications | |
| Cores |
|
| History | |
The Microwatt is an open source soft processor core originally written by Anton Blanchard at IBM, announced at the OpenPOWER Summit NA 2019[2] and published on Github in August 2019. It adheres to the Power ISA 3.0 instruction set and can be run on FPGA boards, booting Linux, MicroPython and Zephyr.[3][4][5][6][7][8]
Implementation
The Microwatt is a tiny 64-bit little endian scalar integer processor core, implementing a subset of the Power ISA 3.0 instruction set. It has 64× 64-bit general purpose registers. It uses Wishbone for the memory interface.[4]
The initial development was done in a couple of months, included the entire integer processing functionality of the instruction set; the bare minimum to make it compliant, with no memory management unit and no floating-point unit.[4]
Later additions to the implementation includes JTAG debugger interface, divider instructions, 16 kB instruction and 32 kB data caches, and pipelining.[4]
It's designed using VHDL 2008 and the GHDL simulation environment.[3]
Chiselwatt
A sibling project called Chiselwatt is another open processor core implementing the Power ISA 3.0 instruction set, written in the Scala based Chisel instead of VHDL.[9][10]
History
It is the first processor written from scratch using the open Power ISA 3.0, and is released by the OpenPOWER Foundation as a reference design.
The project started as a demo, proof of concept and a reference implementation for the release of the opensource initiative regarding Power ISA 3.0.[11] The goal for Blanchard was to see if he could make it, and as a software developer, taking on a very low level hardware project was a challenge.[2][3]
Links
See also
References
- ↑ Williams, Chris (2019-08-29). "Get your royalty-free soft-core OpenPOWER processor core blueprints here. Extra, extra – read all about it" (in en). The Register. https://www.theregister.com/2019/08/29/intel_10nm_fpga_openpower/.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 OpenPOWER Summit NA 2019: Day 2 Keynote Demonstration: Anton Blanchard, IBM & Joe DeLaere, Xilinx
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 "POWER OpenISA and Microwatt introduction" - Anton Blanchard (LCA 2020)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 "Microwatt Microarchitecture" - Paul Mackerras (LCA 2020)
- ↑ Microwatt and the POWER ISA support in Renode
- ↑ Linux on Microwatt
- ↑ OpenPOWER opens further
- ↑ Day 2 keynote and OpenPOWER blows the doors off: Royalty-free, open soft-core (RISC-V sweating gallons)
- ↑ Chiselwatt's page on Github
- ↑ Final Draft of the Power ISA EULA Released
- ↑ Big Blue open sources POWER chip instruction set
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