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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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20 years ago

NIOS II KILLER

A NIOS II killer is born. Codename Mico32 from Lattice.

Seems that soft proc gained a lot of interest for all FPGA vendors.

ARM7 for Actel, MicroBlaze for Xilinx and of course our great NIOS2.

Hey Altera guys what do you think of that ? http://forum.niosforum.com/work2/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif

Note that I&#39;m not endorsed in anyway with Lattice. It&#39;s only that I really **LOVE** soft proc concept and try to be aware of anything about that.

Cheers.

2 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    20 years ago

    If you like it, implement it on an Altera part http://forum.niosforum.com/work2/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif

    It is, after all, open source.

    I just got a little glimpse of the tool-set for the Mico32, it is quite similar to the NIOS2 tool-set. They also use the eclipse environment (so does Microblaze for that matter).

    One interesting thing, the Mico32 offers 1-way or 2-way cache for d$ and/or i$.

    By the way, I am not, in any way, a part of Altera, or actually endorsing the Mico32--just making observations.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    20 years ago

    It seems that the Mico32 is rather large and slow compared to a Nios II.

    Here&#39;s the stats from the Lattice web site:

    Performance and Resource Utilization for LatticeECP2/M Devices1:

    Configuration LUTs fMAX (MHz)

    Basic 1,571 98

    Standard 1,816 116

    Full 2,158 116

    Three Configurations:

    * Basic

    o No Multiplier

    o Multicycle Shifter

    o No Cache

    * Standard

    o Multiplier

    o Pipelined Shifter

    o 8K I-Cache, No D-Cache

    * Full

    o Multiplier

    o Pipelined Shifter

    o 8K I-Cache, 8K D-Cache

    Their "Standard" version is about the size of a Nios II/f but the Nios II/f includes a data cache.

    The frequency of all cores is substantially slower than any of the Nios II cores. Maybe that is a property of the Lattice FPGAs? It would be interesting to get an apples to apples comparison to Nios II by implementing a Mico32 on an Altera device.