In this thesis a microcontroller core is developed in an FPGA. Its instruction set is compatible with the microcontroller PIC16XX series by Microchip Technology. The microcontroller employs a RISC architecture with separate busses for instructions and data. Our goal in this research is to implement and evaluate the design in the FPGA. Increasing performance and gate capacity of recent FPGA devices permits complex logic systems to be implemented on a single programmable device. Such a growing complexity demands design approaches, which can lead to designs containing millions of logic gates, memories, high-speed interfaces, and other high-performance components. In recent years, the continuous development in the area of highly integrated circuits has lead to a change in the design methods used, making it possible to economically utilize FPGAs in many designs.
A test demo board from the Digilent Inc is used to fit our testing requirements of the RISC microcontroller. The test demo board also had the capability of communicating with a personal computer (PC) so that we can load the program from PC. Based on the modern design methods the microcontroller core is developed using the Verilog hardware description language. Xilinx ISE Foundation 6.3i software is used for its synthesis and implementation. An embedded test program code using MPLAB is also developed, and then loaded into the designed microcontroller residing in the FPGA. In order to perform a functional test of the microcontroller core a special test program downloader application is designed by using Borland C++ Builder.
First, the specification from the PIC16XX datasheet is transferred into an abstract behavioral description. Based on that, the next step is to develop a description of the microcontroller core with some minor modifications which can be synthesizable into a FPGA. Finally, the resulting gate level netlist is evaluated and tested using a demo board.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/2/12606694/index.pdf |
| Date | 01 October 2005 |
| Creators | Gumus, Rasit |
| Contributors | Guran, Hasan |
| Publisher | METU |
| Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | M.S. Thesis |
| Format | text/pdf |
| Rights | To liberate the content for METU campus |
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