F-CPU Development Status Report

Speakers: Nicolas Boulay, Cedric Bail

Language: english

Documentation: http://www.f-cpu.org/, http://www.f-cpu.de/, http://www.f-cpu.org/thanks.html

Where: Saal 3

When: Day 3, 10:00

Duration: 01:00h

Description

The goal of the project is to design a free cpu core (free in the sense of "freedom", not free of charge). The CPU is written in VHDL and all the source code and documentation will be available to whoever wants to build one under a GNU licence (or very close to). The contributors want to create a new standard with a good compromise between cost and performance.

Nowadays, the instruction set is defined and most integer execution units (computational blocks) are under design. The main problem is the lack of free synthesis tools (to translate VHDL code into a chip mask) and an enforceable GPL-like licence (electronic circuits obey to specific laws).

We will present all the key issues in the design of a cpu and the global architecture of the F-cpu.