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Altera_Forum
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19 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...
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Altera_Forum
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19 years ago

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

Here'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.