OpenFire Soft Processor

The OpenFire soft processor is an open source Verilog implementation of the Xilinx MicroBlaze processor. Like the MicroBlaze, the OpenFire is a 32-bit RISC processor based on the DLX architecture by Hennessy and Patterson. The OpenFire was developed by Stephen Craven, a PhD student at Virginia Tech, specifically for configurable array research. As such, certain features of the MicroBlaze were not initially implemented. The original implementation of the OpenFire lacks interrupts, exceptions, debugging facilities, and Local Memory Bus (LMB) and On-chip Peripheral Bus (OPB) interfaces. These interfaces were omitted from the original release in order to facilitate an ultra-minimal implementation for the OpenFire. In order to make the OpenFire more useful for other kinds of research there are ongoing efforts to add common peripheral bus support to the OpenFire soft processor.

References

* StephenCraven, CameronPatterson, PeterAthanas. Configurable soft processor arrays using the OpenFire processor. In Proceedings of the 8th Annual Conference on Military and Aerospace Programmable Logic Devices (MAPLD), Washington, DC, September 2005.

External links

* [http://www.ccm.ece.vt.edu/OpenFire OpenFire Home]