[Milkymist-devel] Intel Atom Processor Core Made FPGA-Synthesizable

[Sébastien Bourdeauducq]

Hi,

This interesting paper from Intel explains how they got a FPGA-based Atom 
processor running in a regular PC.

It gives some insight about how a modern processor is designed (entirely in 
SystemVerilog), how it could be ported to FPGA (including a lot of practical 
aspects), and about the debugging and testing phases (on real PC hardware).

"Once the netlist is produced by DC-FPGA, Xilinx ISE 10.1.03 is used to 
produce the final bitfile. However, it turns out that DC-FPGA in rare occasions 
can produce buggy netlist silently, even for a correctly developed RTL circuit 
that passes the RTL simulation"

"Though these behavioral RTL models can be naively passed to the logic 
synthesis tools which may sometimes infer appropriate FPGA-specific memory 
structures, for most structures we observed an explosion in LUT utilization."

URL: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1508160

Sébastien