• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.1406-1421
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• 2019

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has been deployed in almost every facet of our day to day activities. This is made possible because sensing and data collection devices have been given computing and communication capabilities. The devices implement System-on-Chips (SoCs) that incorporate a lot of functionalities, yet they are severely constrained in terms of memory capacitance, hardware area, and power consumption. With the increase in the functionalities of sensing devices, there is a need for low-cost synthesizable processors to handle control, interfacing, and error processing. The first step in selecting a synthesizable processor core for low-cost devices is to examine the hardware resource utilization to make sure that it fulfills the requirements of the device. This paper gives an analysis of the hardware resource usage of ten synthesizable processors that implement the Reduced Instruction Set Computer Five (RISC-V) Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). All the ten processors are synthesized using Vivado v2018.02. The maximum frequency, area, and power reports are extracted and a comparison is made to determine which processor is ideal for low-cost hardware devices.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.83-88
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• 2015

Core-A is 32-bit synthesizable processor core with a unique instruction set architecture (ISA). In this paper, the Core-A ISA is introduced with discussion of useful features and the development environment, including the software tool chain and hardware on-chip debugger. Core-A is described using Verilog-HDL and can be customized for a given application and synthesized for an application-specific integrated circuit or field-programmable gate array target. Also, the GNU Compiler Collection has been ported to support Core-A, and various predesigned platforms are well equipped with the established design flow to speed up the hardware/software co-design for a Core-A-based system.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.337-344
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• 2003

In this paper, we introduce a fully synthesizable 32-bit embedded microprocessor core called the AE32000B. The AE32000B core is based on the extendable instruction set computer architecture, so it has high code density and a low memory access rate. In order to improve the performance of the core, we developed and adopted various design options, including the load extension register instruction (LERI) folding unit, a high performance multiply and accumulate (MAC) unit, various DSP units, and an efficient coprocessor interface. The instructions per cycle count of the Dhrystone 2.1 benchmark for the designed core is about 0.86. We verified the synthesizability and the area and time performances of our design using two CMOS standard cell libraries: a 0.35-${\mu}m$ library and a 0.18-${\mu}m$ library. With the 0.35-${\mu}m$ library, the core can be synthesized with about 47,000 gates and operate at 70 MHz or higher, while it can be synthesized with about 53,000 gates and operate at 120 MHz or higher with the 0.18-${\mu}m$ library.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.328-336
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• 2003

Bluetooth is a specification for short-range wireless communication using the 2.4 GHz ISM band. It emphasizes low complexity, low power, and low cost. This paper describes an area-efficient digital baseband module for wireless technology. For area-efficiency, we carefully consider hardware and software partitioning. We implement complex control tasks of the Bluetooth baseband layer protocols in software running on an embedded microcontroller. Hardware-efficient functions, such as low-level bitstream link control; host controller interfaces (HCIs), such as universal asynchronous receiver transmitter (UART) and universal serial bus (USB)interfaces; and audio Codec are performed by dedicated hardware blocks. Furthermore, we eliminate FIFOs for data buffering between hardware functional units. The design is done using fully synthesizable Verilog HDL to enhance the portability between process technologies so that our module can be easily integrated as an intellectual property core no system-on-a-chip (SoC) ASICs. A field programmable gate array (FPGA) prototype of this module was tested for functional verification and realtime operation of file and bitstream transfers between PCs. The module was fabricated in a $0.25-{\mu}m$ CMOS technology, the core size of which was only 2.79 $mm{\times}2.80mm$.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.305-314
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• 2003

In this paper, we present a soft IP compiler for the Reed-Solomon decoder that generates a fully synthesizable VHDL core exploiting characteristic parameters and design constraints that we newly classify for the soft IP. It produces a structural design with an estimable regular architecture based on a finite state machine with a datapath (FSMD). Since characteristic parameters provide different design points on the design space, using one of two simple procedures called the constructive search with area increment (CSAI) and constructive search with speed decrement (CSSD) for design space exploration, the core compiler makes it possible for an IP user to create the Reed-Solomon decoder with appropriate sub-architectures without synthesizing many models. Experimental results show that the IP compiler can apply to several industry standards.