Altera Licenses MIPS32 Processor Architecture

By _Leibson's Law

October 7, 2009

Even though it’s an obvious technological slam dunk, the fusion of FPGA fabrics with microprocessor architectures on one slab of silicon has a checkered history. Often it seems, either the wrong processor architecture ended up on the silicon or the grafting of the FPGA fabric to the processor’s buses seemingly failed to knit properly. In any case, FPGAs with on-chip hard IP processor cores have not set the world on fire. In addition, although FPGA fabrics can be used to implement soft-IP processors, the result is a lot like trying to teach a pig to sing. The synthesized processors run very slowly, primarily because of the extreme routing congestion around the processor’s register file. The hand-optimized processor cores offered by the major FPGA players are useful and faster, but they're not especially powerful. Microprocessor cores are about four times faster when implemented as hard cores on the FPGA’s silicon. Consequently, the on-and-off marriage of processors and FPGAs has therefore been somewhat quiet for a while. Until now.

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