MPX soft-core processor running on the Papilio One 250K

UltraEmbedded has managed to run a ‘MPX’ soft-core processor on a Papilio One 250K board:

“‘MPX’ is a 32-bit soft-core pipelined RISC processor written in Verilog.The processor implements the majority of MIPS-I™ ISA excluding the formally patented unaligned load/store instructions & also the hw multiplier / divider (mult, multu, div, divu) instructions.”

The missing instructions can be resolved at compile time using a modified build of GCC or by generating traps at runtime on encountering the unsupported instructions.

You can check the source code, FPGA project and FPGA bit files at OpenCores.

And here is an example of an MP3/WAV decoder that was made with this MIPS-like processor, the project is an FPGA based MP3/WAV Player using just a FPGA, some RAM & a stereo DAC.

“The project consists of a custom 32-bit soft core processor running at just under 60MHz which decodes the MP3 algorithm in software with no hardware acceleration apart from a single cycle Xilinx multiplier unit.”

The original article  is complete with a full hardware and software specifications, source code, schematics and much more…

This is a very nice project so feel free to discuss it in the comments thread and give us your thoughts about it.

Click here for the article, enjoy!

You can still profit from our limited time promotion on the Papilio One 250K  and buy your board for only $39.99 at LinkSprite.