D32PRO, fully scalable & royalty-free 32-bit CPU from DCD

Poland, Bytom, September the 17^th, 2015 -- Digital Core Design, an IP Core provider and a System-on-Chip design house from Poland, has introduced the newest CPU. - The D32PRO is a deeply embedded, royalty-free 32-bit CPU. Drawing on its valuable experience - like the world’s fastest 8051 - Digital Core Design created completely new, RISC 32-bit CPU. This silicon proven CPU enables engineers to tailor it to their needs – The D32PRO is fully scalable, hence it can be easily adjusted to get the efficiency comparable to ARM Cortex M0-M3 – explains Tomek Krzyzak, DCD’s vice-president – but there’s no problem to run the Core with maximal performance to get up to 1.48 / 2.67 DMIPS/MHz and 2.41 CoreMarks/MHz.

The D32PRO has been designed from scratch by DCD’s engineers. Since 1999 the company has released over 70 different architectures, among them is the DQ80251, world’s fastest 8051 CPU. – Of course, the D32PRO is an effect of our market experience – adds Krzyzak – but it’s a completely new, innovative solution. We are engineers, so we know the problems we all face in our work – why waste silicon, why limit performance, why shorten peripherals list? The D32PRO answers all these questions.

All peripherals on board

The D32PRO has been equipped with Floating Point Coprocessor and great variety of available peripherals like e.g. USB, Ethernet, I2C, SPI, UART, CAN, LIN, RTC, HDLC, Smart Card etc. Other peripherals can be effortlessly added to the CPU by using standardized interfaces.

Variable pipeline – ultimate code density

The D32PRO is a universal & fully configurable solution, which effectively executes application codes with many jumps (e.g. switching decision tree) as well as homogeneous ones (e.g. arithmetic operations). This wouldn’t be possible without variable pipelining. Another innovation is brought in the command list, which is based on special instructions – derivatives to the higher level language like e.g. C. That approach enabled ultimate code density, which goes in hand with efficient and compact instructions set. Variable length instructions are based on 16 bits and can be executed conditionally. The D32PRO implements the best features of the embedded microcontrollers, where one of them enables efficient cooperation with the attached peripherals, thanks to dedicated bit instructions.

The D32PRO has been equipped with 13 general registers R0-R12 and most of them are being refreshed automatically after interruption. Thanks to it the CPU accelerates interrupts and context switching in real time systems. And if it’s still not enough, the D32PRO has been equipped with one non-maskable and dozens of real-time reconfigurable interrupts: like its activity, priority level and number of automatically stacked registers.

Low energy for (not only) IoT

The D32PRO emphasizes low energy consumption, which is crucial in modern electronics. This is achieved thanks to special PMU (Power Management Unit), which dynamically controls the clock’s frequency. Thanks to it an engineer can program energy-saving mode for the CPU, where all the peripherals will be working with nominal clock. Moreover, the CPU itself can be moved to STOP mode with the clock detached from it. Then it can return to normal mode by an interrupt from any peripheral. In order to save additional power, the CPU can easily switch off the peripherals which are unused at the current moment.

Debugger – Bootloader

The D32PRO, similarly to DCD’s 8051 IP Cores, is delivered with a built-in hardware debugger. But this special solution has been tailored for 32-bit CPU, that’s why it enables full control from Eclipse level (complete Eclipse debugging system with GCC => USB 2.0 cable => D32PRO). Moreover, in DCD’s debugger only two pins have been used as optimal tradeoff between communication throughput and consumed resources, when in competitive solutions communication needs at least 5 pins (JTAG). Hardware bootloader unit enables firmware memory updates directly from external low cost Flash memory connected through the (Q)SPI interface. Moreover, the bootloader is equipped with hardware encryption mechanism which significantly protects firmware against reverse engineering.

More information: www.dcd.pl

Technical information:

CoreMarks/MHz	CoreMarks: 2.41
Dhrystone	1.48 / 2.67 DMIPS/MHz
Power consumption (90nm)	under 7µW/MHz (90LP)
Size (90nm)	Starting from 6.8k to 10.6 k gates

Information about Digital Core Design:

The company founded in 1999, since the beginning stands in the forefront of the IP Core market. High specialization and profound customer service enabled to introduce more than 70 different architectures. Among them is the world’s fastest 8051 IP Core, the DQ80251, which is more than 75 times faster than the standard solution. As an effect, over 300 hundred licensees have been sold to more than 500 companies worldwide. Among them are the biggest enterprises like e.g. Sony, Siemens, General Electric and Toyota. But a lot of DCD’s customers are small businesses, R&D laboratories or front/back end offices, which require exact solution tailored to their project needs. Rough estimations say that more than 300 000 000 devices around the globe have been based on Digital Core Design’s IP Cores.