Paper Details

%T R16: a New Transputer Design for FPGAs
%A John Jakson
%E Jan F. Broenink, Herman Roebbers, Johan P. E. Sunter, Peter H. Welch, David C. Wood
%B Communicating Process Architectures 2005
%X This paper describes the ongoing development of a new FPGA
   hosted Transputer using a Load Store RISC style Multi
   Threaded Architecture (MTA). The memory system throughput is
   emphasized as much as the processor throughput and uses the
   recently developed Micron 32MByte RLDRAM which can start
   fully random memory cycles every 3.3ns with 20ns latency
   when driven by an FPGA controller. The R16 shares an object
   oriented Memory Manager Unit (MMU) amongst multiple low cost
   Processor Elements (PEs) until the MMU throughput limit is
   reached. The PE has been placed and routed at over 300MHz in
   a Xilinx Virtex\-II Pro device and uses around 500 FPGA
   basic cells and 1 Block RAM. The 15 stage pipeline uses 2
   clocks per instruction to greatly simplify the hardware
   design which allows for twice the clock frequency of other
   FPGA processors. There are instruction and cycle accurate
   simulators as well as a C compiler in development. The
   compiler can now emit optimized small functions needed for
   further hardware development although compiling itself
   requires much work. Some occam and Verilog language
   components will be added to the C base to allow a mixed
   occam and event driven processing model. Eventually it is
   planned to allow occam or Verilog source to run as software
   code or be placed as synthesized co processor hardware
   attached to the MMU.

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