Collaborate Disseminate
A few years ago [Takaya Saeki] and fellow students of the University of Tokyo, were given a very limited instruction during their ‘CPU exercise’ class, along the lines of: Take …read more Continue reading Home-Built CPU Runs With Home-Built Toolchain
Part of the reason that retrocomputers are still so popular despite their obsolescence is that it’s possible to understand the entire inner workings of a computer like this, from the …read more Continue reading FPGA Retrocomputer: Return To Moncky
About a year ago when Hackaday and Tindie were at Maker Faire UK in Newcastle, we were shown an interesting retrocomputer by a member of York Hackspace. The Gigatron is a fully functional home computer of the type you might have owned in the early 1980s, but its special trick …read more
RISC architecture is gonna change everything, and I still can’t tell if we like that movie ironically or not. Nevertheless, RISC-V chips are coming onto the market, chipmakers seem really interested in not paying licensing fees, and new hard drives are shipping with RISC-V cores. The latest development in Open instruction sets chips comes from OpenISA. They’ve developed the VEGAboard, a dev board with two RISC-V chips and Arduino-style pin headers.
The VEGAboard comes loaded with an NXP chip which combines an ARM Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M4. So far, so good, but there are already dozens of boards that combine two …read more
If you’re building a computer, your options are nearly limitless. You can get a motherboard with red LEDs, with blue LEDs, green LEDs, or if you’re feeling spendy, RGB LEDs. You can get custom-milled heat spreaders in any shape you want, as long as it’s angular and screams ‘gamer’. If you want a motherboard that doesn’t use x86 — either AMD or Intel — you’re kind of out of luck. Either it doesn’t exist, or it’s going to cost a small fortune.
Raptor Engineering have just released a motherboard that isn’t x86 and doesn’t cost as much as a …read more
Today, SiFive has released two new cores designed for the lower end of computing. This adds to the company’s existing portfolio of microcontrollers and SoCs based on the Open RISC-V ISA. Over the last two years, SiFive has introduced a number of cores based on the RISC-V ISA, an Open Architecture ISA that gives anyone to design and develop a microcontroller or microprocessor platform. These two new cores fill out the low-power end of SiFive’s core portfolio.
The two new cores included in the announcement are the SiFive E20 and E21, both meant for low-power applications, and according to SiFive …read more
Continue reading SiFive Releases Smaller, Lower Power RISC-V Cores
There is great excitement in the world of microprocessors, surrounding the RISC-V architecture. This is an open source modular instruction set specification that has seen implementations on FPGAs, and is starting to emerge in dedicated silicon.
If you are not yet up to speed on what is probably going to be the most important microprocessor development of a generation, you should watch this video. As [Robert Baruch] sets out to demonstrate, the combination of RISC technology and a modular instruction set means that the simplest processor compliant with the RISC-V specification can be surprisingly accessible. And to demonstrate this he’s …read more
Continue reading A RISC-V That The Rest Of Us Can Understand
Last time I looked at a simple 16-bit RISC processor aimed at students. It needed a little help on documentation and had a missing file, but I managed to get it to simulate using a free online tool called EDA Playground. This time, I’ll take you through the code details and how to run the simulation.
You’ll want to refer to the previous post if you didn’t read it already. The diagrams and tables give a high-level overview that will help you understand the files discussed in this post.
If you wanted to actually program this on a real FPGA, …read more
Because I often work with students, I’m always on the look-out for a simple CPU, preferably in Verilog, in the Goldilocks zone. That is, not too easy and not too hard. I had high hopes for this 16-bit RISC processor presented by [fpga4student], but without some extra work, it probably isn’t usable for its intended purpose.
The CPU itself is pretty simple and fits on a fairly long web page. However, the details about it are a bit sparse. This isn’t always a bad thing. You can offer students too much help. Then again, you can also offer too little. …read more
Because I often work with students, I’m always on the look-out for a simple CPU, preferably in Verilog, in the Goldilocks zone. That is, not too easy and not too hard. I had high hopes for this 16-bit RISC processor presented by [fpga4student], but without some extra work, it probably isn’t usable for its intended purpose.
The CPU itself is pretty simple and fits on a fairly long web page. However, the details about it are a bit sparse. This isn’t always a bad thing. You can offer students too much help. Then again, you can also offer too little. …read more
