The EightThirtyTwo ISA – Part 1 – 2019-08-09

In 2019 there are any number of off-the-shelf CPU cores which can be used in FPGA projects, some imitating long-established CPUs such as x86, MC68000, Z80, MIPS, ARM, etc – and some more specifically targetted at the FPGA space, such as NIOS, Microblaze, ZPU, Moxie and suchlike. So why on earth would I consider creating a brand new one from scratch?

As always, because I wanted to learn something, and because even though there are so many existing options, there are still applications for which none of them is ideal.

My design goal is to create a CPU that’s reasonably small – not much bigger than ZPUFlex – so takes up somewhere in the region of 1500 logic elements, while being somewhat faster and offering better code density. Ideally I want something that can supplant the ZPU for control module applications and allow me to reduce the amount of block RAM I have to devote to the code.