A soft microprocessor (also called softcore microprocessor or a soft processor) is a
microprocessor
A microprocessor is a computer processor (computing), processor for which the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit (IC), or a small number of ICs. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, a ...
core that can be wholly implemented using
logic synthesis. It can be implemented via different
semiconductor
A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity between that of a conductor and an insulator. Its conductivity can be modified by adding impurities (" doping") to its crystal structure. When two regions with different doping level ...
devices containing programmable logic (e.g.,
FPGA,
CPLD), including both high-end and commodity variations.
Most systems, if they use a soft processor at all, only use a single soft processor. However, a few designers tile as many soft cores onto an FPGA as will fit. In those
multi-core systems, rarely used resources can be shared between all the cores in a cluster.
While many people put exactly one soft microprocessor on a FPGA, a sufficiently large FPGA can hold two or more soft microprocessors, resulting in a
multi-core processor
A multi-core processor (MCP) is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit (IC) with two or more separate central processing units (CPUs), called ''cores'' to emphasize their multiplicity (for example, ''dual-core'' or ''quad-core''). Ea ...
. The number of soft processors on a single FPGA is limited only by the size of the FPGA. Some people have put dozens or hundreds of soft microprocessors on a single FPGA. This is one way to implement
massive parallelism in computing and can likewise be applied to
in-memory computing.
A soft microprocessor and its surrounding peripherals implemented in a FPGA is less vulnerable to obsolescence than a discrete processor.
[
]
Core comparison
See also
*
System-on-a-chip (SoC)
**
Network-on-a-chip (NoC)
*
Reconfigurable computing
**
Field-programmable gate array (FPGA)
*
VHDL
VHDL (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Program, VHSIC Hardware Description Language) is a hardware description language that can model the behavior and structure of Digital electronics, digital systems at multiple levels of abstraction, ran ...
*
Verilog
Verilog, standardized as IEEE 1364, is a hardware description language (HDL) used to model electronic systems. It is most commonly used in the design and verification of digital circuits, with the highest level of abstraction being at the re ...
**
SystemVerilog
*
Hardware acceleration
References
External links
Soft CPU Cores for FPGAFPGA CPU NewsFreedom CPU websiteMicroprocessor coreson Opencores.org (Expand the "Processor" tab)
NikTech32 bit RISC Microprocessor MANIK.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Soft Microprocessor
*