By whygee on Saturday 4 July 2009, 19:58 - Electronics

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When a project has practical uses and implications, it is interesting to see how it evolves and better fill the gaps that a purely theoretical design would address. For YASEP, the modifications have been very deep, while many of the neat original ideas remain. Lately, there have been a few new ideas that may or may not be implemented.

• A new CRIT instruction :

This is a method to perform atomic instruction sequences. It opens a HW-garanteed CRITical section, that lasts a few and constant number of instructions (1 to 16 depending on the imm4 argument). After/before this, IRQs and other things are checked, to prevent the system from hanging because of back-to-back CRIT instructions...

• External bus expansion with off-chip buffers

In the case where the number of FPGA pins is low, a lot of them are used by external SRAM. The address and data bus could be used to expand the I/O count, by adding a few 74LVC574 and 74LCV245. In this case, a few specific instructions are required because the GET and PUT instructions work only with internal resources. Another issue is the bus loading that might affect the timings and/or speed. The Inputs and outputs could be easily separated, the output latches can be tied to the address bus (because it is unidirectional) while the Input buffers can only be tied to the data bus. Voltage translation is also a desired feature.

• CRC32 accelerator

As the need for a zlib port arises, the necessity to check CRC32 signatures becomes a problem. I have already designed CRC routines and... well... they can become quite heavy. OTOH, it is rather straight-forward to do in hardware. I don't want to make yet another instruction here because this would make the pipeline more complex (and the number of registers is already too small) but a small set of SR will do the trick.

• DMA for SPI

SPI is used when booting the CPU from a SPI Flash memory, or when communicating with Ethernet or 2.4GHz interfaces. Adding a simple DMA capability would save a lot of cycles and latency.

Other things will certainly come later...

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20200408:

CRIT became part of the normal instruction set.

The CRC accelerator didn't go further...

DMA didn't materialise either...