| Electronics > FPGA |
| Microcontroller simulation using Xilinx FPGA |
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| scarletpimpernel:
Boys and girls, Looking for some input and ideas here .. The proposition is to be able to simulate different microcontrollers and architectures thereof using Xilinx FPGA devices. Thoughts along the lines of using published VHDL models of target devices to generate FPGA code; Where these are not available, then use target's design and dev tools to generate VIDL models that will go into code production. The aim: to be able to reconfigure a Xilinx FPGA in such a was as to run binary image code from various microcontrollers. What's your thoughts? anyone went down this line before? anyone interested in hooking up to do that? |
| Balaur:
That's called hardware emulation and it's done extensively in both academic and industrial fields. |
| slateraptor:
Synthesized an architecture almost identical to the Motorola HC11 less interrupt capability as a final project in digital design. Currently working on a project that incorporates a sketch 6502 core (T65 project from opencores.org) on a custom Cyclone IV platform (with a complete hardware redesign around a Spartan-6 circa summer next year). If you've never done it before, you'll have your work cut out for you even if it were to synthesize a relatively simple 8-bit von Neumann architecture. |
| scarletpimpernel:
Thanks for your response everyone. I'm mostly interested in Freescale and Infinion devices. I agree it's a lot of work but worth the effort, IMHO. The intended application is to to construct a generic configurable hardware platform that can emulate the intended target processors, to be able to debug already integrated applications in situ. So the next question, I guess is whether anyone is interested to form a working team around this and get some traction behind the effort by starting with the lower-end devices (e.g. HC05, HC08, HC11 ...etc), then moving up the ladder towards the more powerful variants. Thought: we could start with pre-existing VHDL models from vendors, and put Cadence, Mentor Graphics and other such tools to good use?. Thought: get a wiki behind this. Any volunteers? ;D |
| joelby:
Can you describe in a bit more detail what you want to do? There are open source implementations of HC11, AVRs, PICs, etc. but these are just 'clean room' implementations and may not be cycle accurate, or might contain new/different bugs to the silicon, so debugging an application that would eventually call for a 'real' processor using a third-party model would be ill-advised. Manufacturers generally don't release HDL for their own devices for obvious reasons. Have you actually found official models? OpenSPARC is the only one that comes to mind. If you just want to use your PIC/AVR/whatever compiler or development environment to produce programs for FPGA soft cores, you should already be able to do this with a decent core implementation. Most modern microcontrollers contain in-circuit debugging interfaces, so in-circuit emulation seems to be a thing of the past. A generic hardware platform that can emulate many different processors in situ would be tricky, since chips come in so many different packages and sockets are hardly used these days. How would you emulate integrated analog peripherals such as an ADC? |
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