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db_connect: Could not connect to paper db at "wotug@dragon.kent.ac.uk"
%T R16: a New Transputer Design for FPGAs
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%A John Jakson
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%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.