RISC Processor

A small RISC CPU (written in VHDL) that is compatible with the 12 bit opcode PIC family. Single cycle operation normally, two cycles when the program counter is modified. Clock speeds of over 40Mhz are possible when using the Xilinx Virtex optimizations.
Licensed under LGPL.

The core has a single pipeline stage and is run from a single clock, so (ignoring program counter changes) a 40Mhz clock will give 40 MIPS processing speed. Any instruction which modifies the program counter, for example a branch or skip, will result in a pipeline stall and this will only cost one additional clock cycle.

The CPU architecture chosen is not particularly FPGA friendly, for example multiplexers are generally quite expensive. The maximum combinatorial path delay is also long, so to ease the place and route tool's job the core is written at a low level. It instantiates a number of library macros, for example a 4:1 mux. Two versions of these are given, one is generic VHDL and the second is optimized for Xilinx Virtex series (including Spartan devices).