Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
Lattice Semiconductor is offering an 8-bit soft microcontroller FPGA core as an open intellectual property (IP) core licence, a first for the FPGA supplier.
According to Lattice, the licence is intended to encourage design experimentation because it applies many of the concepts of the successful open source movement to IP cores targeted for programmable logic applications.
Aimed at the LatticeECP, LatticeEC and LatticeXP FPGA families, it can also be implemented in the firm’s recently released MachXO family of Crossover Programmable Logic Devices.
The microcontroller consumes less than 200 Look Up Tables (LUTs) in the smallest configuration. It features 18-bit wide instructions, 32 general purpose registers and 32byte of internal scratch pad memory.
In addition to the core design in Verilog, Lattice also provides an assembler and an instruction set simulator, both as source code.
A demo is available for download that allows users to implement a working design on a Lattice evaluation board.
In addition to the LatticeMico8 microcontroller, the firm provides other 8-bit microcontroller solutions through its ispLEVERCore partners, Cast Inc. and Digital Core Design, including the 8051 and PIC.
