Microwatt - A simple Open POWER soft processor
summary
Microwatt is a tiny Open POWER soft core published on GitHub in late August that implements a ~100‑instruction fixed‑point subset of the POWER ISA, written in VHDL 2008 and tested with ghdl and a yosys‑based flow (with a vendor VHDL→Verilog converter used for FPGA synthesis). It boots microPython, uses an existing POWER core as a golden model for random instruction testing, initially lacks a hardware divider (added later), has UART and DRAM workarounds, and is released under a royalty‑free patent license.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:12About Anton Blanchard
- 1:12OpenPOWER
- 1:33Firmware
- 1:54Open Source
- 2:13Instruction Set
- 3:16What is Microwatt
- 4:17G HDL
- 4:45First commit
- 5:33Whats happened
- 6:27Whats right
- 7:10The advantage
- 8:01The mistakes
- 8:54Double character print
- 9:39Software stack
- 10:01Its fun
- 11:16Next steps
related talks
16mPOWER OpenISA and Microwatt introduction
30mMicrowatt and GHDL - An Open Hardware CPU written in VHDL...
03h 10mSoC in Hours - A Power Chat
25mHow open is OpenPOWER?
11mWelcome
01h 13mWelcome & Keynote Sessions
18mOpen Source Tools - Learn and Explore EDA...
19mOpen Source Processor IP for High Volume Production SoCs CORE V Family