English
Successful Use of an Open Source Processor in a Commercial ASIC
by Declan Staunton, Silicon & Software Systems
Dublin, Ireland
Abstract
Open source IP has been slow to take off in commercial IC development for very good reasons. Immaturity of designs, lack of support, licensing and warranty concerns would normally ensure open source IP cores are not even considered as solutions. However there are situations, and in the case of the LEON core, there are solutions that warrant consideration for certain types of application. Here we describe our experience in using the LEON processor in a commercial ASIC. Both benefits and drawbacks are described before concluding that LEON was an excellent solution for this design.
Introduction
Processor selection is one of the key design decisions in any SoC development. For this development there were fewer constraints than would normally be encountered when choosing a processor. In particular there was no legacy software or particular operating system that needed to be supported. Furthermore the vast majority of the logic design was from scratch so there were no legacy bus interfaces to support. The ASIC was intended for use in a high volume embedded system. As can be seen from the block diagram in Fig 1 this was a typical SoC design. The principal requirements were:
1) Performance: The initial performance requirements were relatively low but these grew in time. There were some hard real-time requirements and many firm (meaning the system would not fail but the user could perceive a slowdown) real-time requirements
2) Low or no royalty: As very high volumes were expected this was important in keeping the unit price low
3) Supervisor & User modes: The processor would have to support the execution of third party code without jeopardizing the integrity of the system.
Power consumption was not a significant concern and while a synthesizable core was preferable this was primarily due to the unsuitability of the hard cores that were available for the fabrication process used.
A number of 16 and 32-bit commercial cores were considered before concluding that the LEON processor offered the best overall solution.
Figure 1: Block diagram of the LEON powered SoC
The LEON Processor
LEON is a VHDL implementation of the open standard (IEEE1754) SPARC V8 architecture [1]. LEON is a highly configurable, synthesizable, 32-bit core with pre-selectable cache sizes (both I & D), optional floating point unit and hardware acceleration for multiply and divide instructions, debug monitor, AMBA AHB [2] interface and support for a co-processor. Most of the features of LEON can be configured via a simple GUI which produces a VHDL file of constants that is then referenced by the other source files. A screenshot of this GUI showing the configuration options for the Integer Unit is shown in Fig 2.
The LEON3 processor is available under GPL and commercial license arrangements. A LGPL version (LEON2) is also available. In fact for most of the design phase the LEON2 core was used but a late change to the LEON3 core was made for licensing reasons. Despite occurring late in the design phase, the switchover from LEON2 to LEON3 was not difficult.
A full software development environment based on the GNU C/C++ compiler is available for LEON. An instruction set simulator (TSIM) is also available although this was only rarely used by the IC development team. The LEON cores and associated IP are available from and supported by Gaisler Research [3]
Figure 2: LEON configuration GUI
Using LEON
Familiarisation with the LEON design was quite straightforward but could have been accelerated by more complete design documentation and better coding practices. The code itself was written in a consistent style but the signal and variable naming were often not very descriptive and comments were scant. Moreover the extensive use of VHDL records caused problems with some tools and in some cases a record had to be broken out into its constituent signals.
The first step in customizing LEON for our application was the identification of the component entities we wished to retain and excising these from the LEON deliverable (which includes bridges, interfaces and peripherals to make it a SoC in its own right). The components of interest were at the heart of the processor – the Integer Unit (IU), Cache controllers and AHB interface (there were some 22 VHDL files required to describe these completely). A testbench was created to verify the operation of these components in isolation from the rest of the LEON processor.
The next step was the creation of a bridge between the LEON AHB interface and the proprietary bus interfaces to the on-chip DRAM and peripherals. While AMBA buses were not used elsewhere on the chip their use was advantageous due to the familiarity of the design team with the standard. With the bridge in place the LEON CPU core could then be integrated with the remainder of the ASIC (or more specifically the portions of it that existed at that time). It was also necessary to select and integrate the correct memories and register files for the cache data and tag rams and the IU register file. At a later date it was also necessary to select the appropriate hardware multiplier and divider circuits. LEON does support memories and register arrays from a number of foundries (and also FPGA targets) but the foundry for this ASIC was not supported so this step took some work. Simple wrappers were also required for each register array / memory.
Modifications
In order to fulfill the application requirements some modifications and enhancements were required to the LEON CPU components. All of the LEON related design work was confined to the CPU subsystem level of hierarchy depicted in Fig 3 below and this was performed in parallel with the rest of the ASIC design. Firstly, as the LEON cache controllers refilled the 256-bit wide cache lines by reading 32 bits at a time and the on-chip DRAM produced 256-bit lines for every read, it was highly inefficient to read the same DRAM line 8 times in order to refill a line in the LEON caches. By making a few changes to both the instruction and data cache controllers and cache memories it was possible to refill the entire cache line with the 256 bits yielded by the DRAM read thus reducing the number of DRAM reads required from 8 to 1.
The most significant enhancement was the addition of a Memory Management Unit (MMU). Code is executed on the processor in either supervisor or user mode and the application required strict enforcement of security rules to ensure user mode code was restricted in its operation. The primary function of the MMU was the protection of supervisor mode code and data from user mode accesses. The MMU was simpler than conventional MMUs in that it did not feature a Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB), although it did implement the memory map for the IC. It is not compatible with the SPARC Reference MMU specification [4]. The MMU allowed the DRAM address space to be split into up to 8 regions with each region having programmable access permissions and start / stop boundaries. The programmable registers controlling the MMU could of course only be accessed when executing code in supervisor mode.
Access control for the on-chip peripherals was distributed i.e. the access control signals were propagated to each peripheral and each peripheral could accept or reject an access depending on the permissions of the access and the peripherals settings (this was often determined on a register by register basis). In addition to controlling access to the DRAM and peripherals the MMU also included the AHB to proprietary bus bridges for the DRAM data bus and the CPU peripheral bus, a write buffer and a bus timeout function to avoid possible bus hangs.
The purpose of the write buffer was to improve write performance to minimize the impact of register window over / underflows. Register windows are a feature of SPARC processors and can allow fast context switching between tasks. However when a register window over / underflow occurs the worst case context switch time may become prohibitive for real-time applications. A small posted write buffer was added which combined a number of CPU writes into a single write to the wide DRAM. This was found to improve write performance significantly (particularly for the sequential writes that are characteristic of window over / underflow handling) at the cost of complicating the design to ensure data coherency was upheld in all situations.
Further modifications were made to the data cache to enforce user / supervisor data security. Code is executed on the processor in either supervisor or user mode and the application required strict enforcement of security rules to ensure user mode code was restricted in its operation. Extra tag bits and logic were added to the data cache to ensure user mode code could not retrieve supervisor data from the data cache (this was possible with the basic LEON design) and the MMU enforced the security of supervisor mode code and data outside of the caches.
After a reset, the processor starts executing code from address #00000000. In order to assist with software error handling (e.g. null pointer de-referencing) all accesses to the bottom four word locations (i.e. #00000000 to #0000000C) were trapped by the MMU unless they were made by the reset handler. In all there were six different conditions introduced that could be trapped by the MMU to protect the integrity of the system.
These customisations were made while preserving all of the existing LEON functionality i.e. no previous LEON functionality was compromised by the enhancements. While this required a little more design and verification effort it offered increased confidence in the modified design.
Figure 3: CPU subsystem block diagram
Integration
As previously mentioned integration of LEON with the remainder of the chip was mostly a matter of choosing the correct technology specific macros (i.e. SRAMs, register arrays, multiplier etc) and then connecting it together. Because the CPU peripherals had been verified using a bus functional model of the CPU peripheral bus prior to integration they all worked first time with the real CPU. One issue that did require some attention during integration was endianness. SPARC, and therefore LEON, is a big endian architecture but the rest of the system was little endian. Thus, when data was shared between the CPU and other blocks (some of which had DMAs with byte-write capability) careful thought was needed to ensure that bytes were not swapped around incorrectly. These scenarios were also subjected to significant directed testing to ensure everything was correct. Where endianness coherency could not be handled by hardware the need for byte swapping in software was clearly flagged to the software developers.
Verification
A number of different approaches were used to verify the functionality and integration of the CPU within the ASIC including RTL verification, behavioural modeling in C and VHDL, external certification of the processor and FPGA emulation. Unfortunately a complete discussion of the verification strategy used is outside the scope of this paper. The primary approach for testing the functionality of the CPU (and in particular the customizations of the LEON components) was at the subsystem level. This level consisted of all the CPU subsystem components shown in Fig 3, the Interrupt Controller (this was a new design rather than the LEON interrupt controller), ROM, RAM, DRAM arbiter and a behavioural model for the DRAM. Tests were developed using C and assembly language, compiled using the GNU toolkit available with LEON and then post processed into appropriately formatted memory images by perl scripts. A VHDL testbench performed the necessary stimulus generation and signal monitoring.
LEON modules that were customized were subjected to full functional verification (i.e. not just the changes were tested). As the original LEON tests that formed part of the release were not considered rigorous enough for production silicon extra effort was expended to ensure satisfactory verification coverage, particularly of the cache controllers.
Over the course of the development a number of minor bugs in the LEON design were uncovered by the verification which were promptly fixed by Gaisler Research. The success of the verification is best demonstrated by the fact that the silicon worked first time upon return from the fab without a single bug.
FPGA Emulation
A significant software development was required to generate the ROM image and further post-boot downloadable code. While there is an instruction level simulator (TSIM) available for the LEON processor it could not model the modifications made to the LEON modules or the other on-chip components particular to this design. FPGA emulation was clearly the best solution especially as it also provided an additional layer of functional verification.
An off the shelf third party board based on a Xilinx Virtex-II 6000 FGPA was chosen for its large FPGA and short lead time. Retargeting the LEON modules to the FPGA was straightforward as Xilinx FPGAs were already supported as a target technology in the LEON code. Two additional LEON modules were implemented on the FPGA which would not be present on the ASIC – the Debug Support Unit (DSU) and a UART. These were required to facilitate software debug and communication with a host PC.
S3’s GNAT (General-purpose Native jtAg Tester) [5][6] module was used as part of the FPGA development environment. This module allows access to the FPGA logic (including ROM / RAM and I/Os) via its JTAG port. When used in conjunction with VNC [7] full remote control, even from other sites, of the FPGA board was possible. This allowed the ROM contents to be updated, the processor reset and onboard LEDs and internal registers to be monitored all without having to go to the lab.
Benefits
Outside of the obvious cost savings one of the primary benefits of using LEON was the ease with which its capabilities could be augmented as the requirements grew. This was a significant benefit because, as with all developments, requirements did change. Initially a cacheless Integer Unit was to be sufficient but this evolved into a final configuration with 1 kB I & D caches with the enhancements referred to earlier and hardware support for the SPARC multiply, multiply and accumulate, and divide instructions. As the entire source code was available for the extra LEON features from the very beginning the new features could be turned on easily and quickly without the need for further dialog (or negotiation) with the supplier. Indeed once the simulation and synthesis environments had been set-up simple ‘what-if’ analyses could be easily achieved by choosing different configuration options with the GUI referred to earlier and executing our makefile based flow.
Access to the source code and the freedom to modify it proved very useful not only in performing the customizations described but also during debug as it was possible to tease out detailed functionality and to obtain a more complete understanding of certain behaviours. Without this freedom to modify the core the same degree of performance improvement would not have been possible. Furthermore if similar functionality was designed into the non-CPU logic its complexity, and the probability of a error, would have been increased.
LEON has been designed with direct support for a number of fabrication technologies (including FPGA) and porting it to a new technology was not difficult. The code synthesized cleanly and posed no problems in physical design.
Finally the commercial support provided by Gaisler Research for the duration of the development was excellent. We enjoyed a direct interface to the engineers who designed the core and they were always prompt and accurate in their responses.
Drawbacks
The coding style used for LEON required some familiarisation and the lack of comments and detailed design documentation hampered progress from time to time. The widespread use of records also caused problems for some CAD tools (although these may have been addressed by the tool vendors by now). There were also a number of new releases of the LEON database which fortunately had little effect on our development – this was because the modules we were using in our design were only occasionally modified in these new releases.
Other embedded applications, especially those with significant real-time requirements, may not find LEON such a good solution as the use of register windows makes context switching times difficult to predict and poor in the worst case. Furthermore the register file for the IU is large – a 144 x 32, 3-port register array was required in our implementation which used the standard configuration of eight register windows.
While the software support for LEON is increasing all the time (a Linux port is now available) careful consideration should be given to both legacy (as porting may be non-trivial) and new software requirements. This was not a problem in our application.
While the code itself has been used and refined many times the testcases that formed part of the releases used in our development were not comprehensive enough for an ASIC tapeout. Supplementary testing was required in our case.
Conclusion
Processor selection is one of the most important decisions to be made in developing a SoC. When faced with a clean-sheet design the LEON core is certainly worthy of serious consideration. The overall quality of the LEON offering is broadly equal to, and often better than, that of other commercial IP blocks. While it could be used without any modifications the possibilities for customization are powerful. Access to the source code, and the ability to modify it, allowed us to customize the core to our requirements rather than complicate the logic external to the core. This enabled us to achieve better performance, better verification and a higher quality design with zero defects. While LEON may not be as widely suitable as the market leading processor cores, it proved to be an excellent choice for this design and doubtless will prove to be so for many others.
References
[1] www.sparc.com/standards.html
[2] www.arm.com/products/solutions/AMBA_Spec.html
[3] www.gaisler.com
[4] SPARC V8 Architecture Manual, Appendix H
[5] www.s3group.com/system_ic/gnat/
[6] http://www.xilinx.com/publications/xcellonline/xcell_53/xc_jtag53.htm
[7] www.realvnc.com, www.tightvnc.com
Dublin, Ireland
Abstract
Open source IP has been slow to take off in commercial IC development for very good reasons. Immaturity of designs, lack of support, licensing and warranty concerns would normally ensure open source IP cores are not even considered as solutions. However there are situations, and in the case of the LEON core, there are solutions that warrant consideration for certain types of application. Here we describe our experience in using the LEON processor in a commercial ASIC. Both benefits and drawbacks are described before concluding that LEON was an excellent solution for this design.
Introduction
Processor selection is one of the key design decisions in any SoC development. For this development there were fewer constraints than would normally be encountered when choosing a processor. In particular there was no legacy software or particular operating system that needed to be supported. Furthermore the vast majority of the logic design was from scratch so there were no legacy bus interfaces to support. The ASIC was intended for use in a high volume embedded system. As can be seen from the block diagram in Fig 1 this was a typical SoC design. The principal requirements were:
1) Performance: The initial performance requirements were relatively low but these grew in time. There were some hard real-time requirements and many firm (meaning the system would not fail but the user could perceive a slowdown) real-time requirements
2) Low or no royalty: As very high volumes were expected this was important in keeping the unit price low
3) Supervisor & User modes: The processor would have to support the execution of third party code without jeopardizing the integrity of the system.
Power consumption was not a significant concern and while a synthesizable core was preferable this was primarily due to the unsuitability of the hard cores that were available for the fabrication process used.
A number of 16 and 32-bit commercial cores were considered before concluding that the LEON processor offered the best overall solution.
Figure 1: Block diagram of the LEON powered SoC
The LEON Processor
LEON is a VHDL implementation of the open standard (IEEE1754) SPARC V8 architecture [1]. LEON is a highly configurable, synthesizable, 32-bit core with pre-selectable cache sizes (both I & D), optional floating point unit and hardware acceleration for multiply and divide instructions, debug monitor, AMBA AHB [2] interface and support for a co-processor. Most of the features of LEON can be configured via a simple GUI which produces a VHDL file of constants that is then referenced by the other source files. A screenshot of this GUI showing the configuration options for the Integer Unit is shown in Fig 2.
The LEON3 processor is available under GPL and commercial license arrangements. A LGPL version (LEON2) is also available. In fact for most of the design phase the LEON2 core was used but a late change to the LEON3 core was made for licensing reasons. Despite occurring late in the design phase, the switchover from LEON2 to LEON3 was not difficult.
A full software development environment based on the GNU C/C++ compiler is available for LEON. An instruction set simulator (TSIM) is also available although this was only rarely used by the IC development team. The LEON cores and associated IP are available from and supported by Gaisler Research [3]
Figure 2: LEON configuration GUI
Using LEON
Familiarisation with the LEON design was quite straightforward but could have been accelerated by more complete design documentation and better coding practices. The code itself was written in a consistent style but the signal and variable naming were often not very descriptive and comments were scant. Moreover the extensive use of VHDL records caused problems with some tools and in some cases a record had to be broken out into its constituent signals.
The first step in customizing LEON for our application was the identification of the component entities we wished to retain and excising these from the LEON deliverable (which includes bridges, interfaces and peripherals to make it a SoC in its own right). The components of interest were at the heart of the processor – the Integer Unit (IU), Cache controllers and AHB interface (there were some 22 VHDL files required to describe these completely). A testbench was created to verify the operation of these components in isolation from the rest of the LEON processor.
The next step was the creation of a bridge between the LEON AHB interface and the proprietary bus interfaces to the on-chip DRAM and peripherals. While AMBA buses were not used elsewhere on the chip their use was advantageous due to the familiarity of the design team with the standard. With the bridge in place the LEON CPU core could then be integrated with the remainder of the ASIC (or more specifically the portions of it that existed at that time). It was also necessary to select and integrate the correct memories and register files for the cache data and tag rams and the IU register file. At a later date it was also necessary to select the appropriate hardware multiplier and divider circuits. LEON does support memories and register arrays from a number of foundries (and also FPGA targets) but the foundry for this ASIC was not supported so this step took some work. Simple wrappers were also required for each register array / memory.
Modifications
In order to fulfill the application requirements some modifications and enhancements were required to the LEON CPU components. All of the LEON related design work was confined to the CPU subsystem level of hierarchy depicted in Fig 3 below and this was performed in parallel with the rest of the ASIC design. Firstly, as the LEON cache controllers refilled the 256-bit wide cache lines by reading 32 bits at a time and the on-chip DRAM produced 256-bit lines for every read, it was highly inefficient to read the same DRAM line 8 times in order to refill a line in the LEON caches. By making a few changes to both the instruction and data cache controllers and cache memories it was possible to refill the entire cache line with the 256 bits yielded by the DRAM read thus reducing the number of DRAM reads required from 8 to 1.
The most significant enhancement was the addition of a Memory Management Unit (MMU). Code is executed on the processor in either supervisor or user mode and the application required strict enforcement of security rules to ensure user mode code was restricted in its operation. The primary function of the MMU was the protection of supervisor mode code and data from user mode accesses. The MMU was simpler than conventional MMUs in that it did not feature a Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB), although it did implement the memory map for the IC. It is not compatible with the SPARC Reference MMU specification [4]. The MMU allowed the DRAM address space to be split into up to 8 regions with each region having programmable access permissions and start / stop boundaries. The programmable registers controlling the MMU could of course only be accessed when executing code in supervisor mode.
Access control for the on-chip peripherals was distributed i.e. the access control signals were propagated to each peripheral and each peripheral could accept or reject an access depending on the permissions of the access and the peripherals settings (this was often determined on a register by register basis). In addition to controlling access to the DRAM and peripherals the MMU also included the AHB to proprietary bus bridges for the DRAM data bus and the CPU peripheral bus, a write buffer and a bus timeout function to avoid possible bus hangs.
The purpose of the write buffer was to improve write performance to minimize the impact of register window over / underflows. Register windows are a feature of SPARC processors and can allow fast context switching between tasks. However when a register window over / underflow occurs the worst case context switch time may become prohibitive for real-time applications. A small posted write buffer was added which combined a number of CPU writes into a single write to the wide DRAM. This was found to improve write performance significantly (particularly for the sequential writes that are characteristic of window over / underflow handling) at the cost of complicating the design to ensure data coherency was upheld in all situations.
Further modifications were made to the data cache to enforce user / supervisor data security. Code is executed on the processor in either supervisor or user mode and the application required strict enforcement of security rules to ensure user mode code was restricted in its operation. Extra tag bits and logic were added to the data cache to ensure user mode code could not retrieve supervisor data from the data cache (this was possible with the basic LEON design) and the MMU enforced the security of supervisor mode code and data outside of the caches.
After a reset, the processor starts executing code from address #00000000. In order to assist with software error handling (e.g. null pointer de-referencing) all accesses to the bottom four word locations (i.e. #00000000 to #0000000C) were trapped by the MMU unless they were made by the reset handler. In all there were six different conditions introduced that could be trapped by the MMU to protect the integrity of the system.
These customisations were made while preserving all of the existing LEON functionality i.e. no previous LEON functionality was compromised by the enhancements. While this required a little more design and verification effort it offered increased confidence in the modified design.
Figure 3: CPU subsystem block diagram
Integration
As previously mentioned integration of LEON with the remainder of the chip was mostly a matter of choosing the correct technology specific macros (i.e. SRAMs, register arrays, multiplier etc) and then connecting it together. Because the CPU peripherals had been verified using a bus functional model of the CPU peripheral bus prior to integration they all worked first time with the real CPU. One issue that did require some attention during integration was endianness. SPARC, and therefore LEON, is a big endian architecture but the rest of the system was little endian. Thus, when data was shared between the CPU and other blocks (some of which had DMAs with byte-write capability) careful thought was needed to ensure that bytes were not swapped around incorrectly. These scenarios were also subjected to significant directed testing to ensure everything was correct. Where endianness coherency could not be handled by hardware the need for byte swapping in software was clearly flagged to the software developers.
Verification
A number of different approaches were used to verify the functionality and integration of the CPU within the ASIC including RTL verification, behavioural modeling in C and VHDL, external certification of the processor and FPGA emulation. Unfortunately a complete discussion of the verification strategy used is outside the scope of this paper. The primary approach for testing the functionality of the CPU (and in particular the customizations of the LEON components) was at the subsystem level. This level consisted of all the CPU subsystem components shown in Fig 3, the Interrupt Controller (this was a new design rather than the LEON interrupt controller), ROM, RAM, DRAM arbiter and a behavioural model for the DRAM. Tests were developed using C and assembly language, compiled using the GNU toolkit available with LEON and then post processed into appropriately formatted memory images by perl scripts. A VHDL testbench performed the necessary stimulus generation and signal monitoring.
LEON modules that were customized were subjected to full functional verification (i.e. not just the changes were tested). As the original LEON tests that formed part of the release were not considered rigorous enough for production silicon extra effort was expended to ensure satisfactory verification coverage, particularly of the cache controllers.
Over the course of the development a number of minor bugs in the LEON design were uncovered by the verification which were promptly fixed by Gaisler Research. The success of the verification is best demonstrated by the fact that the silicon worked first time upon return from the fab without a single bug.
FPGA Emulation
A significant software development was required to generate the ROM image and further post-boot downloadable code. While there is an instruction level simulator (TSIM) available for the LEON processor it could not model the modifications made to the LEON modules or the other on-chip components particular to this design. FPGA emulation was clearly the best solution especially as it also provided an additional layer of functional verification.
An off the shelf third party board based on a Xilinx Virtex-II 6000 FGPA was chosen for its large FPGA and short lead time. Retargeting the LEON modules to the FPGA was straightforward as Xilinx FPGAs were already supported as a target technology in the LEON code. Two additional LEON modules were implemented on the FPGA which would not be present on the ASIC – the Debug Support Unit (DSU) and a UART. These were required to facilitate software debug and communication with a host PC.
S3’s GNAT (General-purpose Native jtAg Tester) [5][6] module was used as part of the FPGA development environment. This module allows access to the FPGA logic (including ROM / RAM and I/Os) via its JTAG port. When used in conjunction with VNC [7] full remote control, even from other sites, of the FPGA board was possible. This allowed the ROM contents to be updated, the processor reset and onboard LEDs and internal registers to be monitored all without having to go to the lab.
Benefits
Outside of the obvious cost savings one of the primary benefits of using LEON was the ease with which its capabilities could be augmented as the requirements grew. This was a significant benefit because, as with all developments, requirements did change. Initially a cacheless Integer Unit was to be sufficient but this evolved into a final configuration with 1 kB I & D caches with the enhancements referred to earlier and hardware support for the SPARC multiply, multiply and accumulate, and divide instructions. As the entire source code was available for the extra LEON features from the very beginning the new features could be turned on easily and quickly without the need for further dialog (or negotiation) with the supplier. Indeed once the simulation and synthesis environments had been set-up simple ‘what-if’ analyses could be easily achieved by choosing different configuration options with the GUI referred to earlier and executing our makefile based flow.
Access to the source code and the freedom to modify it proved very useful not only in performing the customizations described but also during debug as it was possible to tease out detailed functionality and to obtain a more complete understanding of certain behaviours. Without this freedom to modify the core the same degree of performance improvement would not have been possible. Furthermore if similar functionality was designed into the non-CPU logic its complexity, and the probability of a error, would have been increased.
LEON has been designed with direct support for a number of fabrication technologies (including FPGA) and porting it to a new technology was not difficult. The code synthesized cleanly and posed no problems in physical design.
Finally the commercial support provided by Gaisler Research for the duration of the development was excellent. We enjoyed a direct interface to the engineers who designed the core and they were always prompt and accurate in their responses.
Drawbacks
The coding style used for LEON required some familiarisation and the lack of comments and detailed design documentation hampered progress from time to time. The widespread use of records also caused problems for some CAD tools (although these may have been addressed by the tool vendors by now). There were also a number of new releases of the LEON database which fortunately had little effect on our development – this was because the modules we were using in our design were only occasionally modified in these new releases.
Other embedded applications, especially those with significant real-time requirements, may not find LEON such a good solution as the use of register windows makes context switching times difficult to predict and poor in the worst case. Furthermore the register file for the IU is large – a 144 x 32, 3-port register array was required in our implementation which used the standard configuration of eight register windows.
While the software support for LEON is increasing all the time (a Linux port is now available) careful consideration should be given to both legacy (as porting may be non-trivial) and new software requirements. This was not a problem in our application.
While the code itself has been used and refined many times the testcases that formed part of the releases used in our development were not comprehensive enough for an ASIC tapeout. Supplementary testing was required in our case.
Conclusion
Processor selection is one of the most important decisions to be made in developing a SoC. When faced with a clean-sheet design the LEON core is certainly worthy of serious consideration. The overall quality of the LEON offering is broadly equal to, and often better than, that of other commercial IP blocks. While it could be used without any modifications the possibilities for customization are powerful. Access to the source code, and the ability to modify it, allowed us to customize the core to our requirements rather than complicate the logic external to the core. This enabled us to achieve better performance, better verification and a higher quality design with zero defects. While LEON may not be as widely suitable as the market leading processor cores, it proved to be an excellent choice for this design and doubtless will prove to be so for many others.
References
[1] www.sparc.com/standards.html
[2] www.arm.com/products/solutions/AMBA_Spec.html
[3] www.gaisler.com
[4] SPARC V8 Architecture Manual, Appendix H
[5] www.s3group.com/system_ic/gnat/
[6] http://www.xilinx.com/publications/xcellonline/xcell_53/xc_jtag53.htm
[7] www.realvnc.com, www.tightvnc.com
|
||||||
Related Articles
- 7 Steps to a Successful Analog ASIC
- Using static analysis to detect coding errors in open source security-critical server applications
- Developing Silicon IP with Open Source Tools
- Single event effects (SEEs) in FPGAs, ASICs, and processors, part I: impact and analysis
- A nuts and bolts engineering approach to using open source IP
New Articles
Most Popular
|
E-mail This Article | 
|
|
Printer-Friendly Page |