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Soft cores absorb designs
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10/06/2005
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Given the reports of the death of the asic, it is a little surprising to learn that soft processor cores are going from strength to strength. In reality, the cores in question aren’t necessarily destined for asics, which is one of their great strengths. Often today an fpga will be the target and all the leading fpga vendors offer soft processor cores. Xilinx has recently introduced version 4.0 of MicroBlaze, which operates at up to 200MHz in its Virtex 4 devices and in alignment with other soft core vendors, it now has an optional floating point unit which increases performance by as much as 120 times over software emulation.
In the near future, the end device could just as likely be one of the burgeoning platform/structured asics. Application specific standard parts, too, are more often than not harbouring an outsourced processor core these days, whether it be visible to the end user or not. For some time the two ‘default’ embedded processor vendors have been ARM and MIPS, but they no longer enjoy such an oligopoly, now that ARC and Tensilica – both of which employ extensible architectures to differentiate themselves – have grown in stature.
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Author
Philip Ling
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