ZPUino is born (almost!)

Hello all, and welcome one of my newest projects, ZPUino.

What ZPUino is, you may ask ? Well, is a SoC (System On-a-Chip) comprising one small CPU, a few devices, and it's meant be implemented on a FPGA and mimic, to some extent, the so sucessfull Arduino platform.

I'll keep you posted about general updates and news about the project.

Right now it's on ALPHA state - meaning that it works, it was already implemented on FPGA and proved working, but not yet ready for production.

You can dowload HDL and some code from http://repo.or.cz/w/zpu/zpuino.git.

Here's a small description for the device I wrote:

1) What is ZPUino ?

ZPUino is a SoC (System-on-a-Chip) based on Zylin's ZPU 32-bit processor core.

2) What is inside ZPUino ?

Harware-wise, ZPUino currently integrates the following devices:

* ZPU small core (slightly modified) [optional medium-core, still on the forge]
* One UART
* One SPI interface
* Two 16-bit timers
* One TSC (Time Stamp Counter)
* 32-bit GPIO interface
* Interrupt Controller
* One SigmaDelta output [NEW!]

UART Specifications:

* 16-bit prescaler.
* 16-byte deep receive FIFO

SPI Specifications:

* Programmable prescaler.
* Configurable CPOL.
* Configurable SRE (Sample on Rising Edge) [NEW!]
* 8-bit transmission mode, 4 byte (32 bit) receive register.

Timers Specifications:

* 10-bit prescaler
* 16-bit wide counter
* Count-up and Count-down mode
* 16-bit Compare register
* Clear on Compare match support
* Interrupt support on Compare Match
* Output compare Register to GPIO pin (allows PWM) [NEW!]

Interrupt controller Specifications:

* Up to 16 interrupt lines
* Ensures safety (does not allow interrupt recursion)
* 16-bit interrupt mask [NEW!]
* Interrupt Enable bit

GPIO Specifications:

* 32-bit wide (one reserved for SPI)
* Bi-directional (tristate) configuration.

IO Configuration:

* Blocking IO [NEW!]

SigmaDelta Configuration:

* One 16-bit channel [NEW!]
* Blocking and non-Blocking support [NEW!]

Software-wise, it supports the following features:

* 4Kb Bootloader, which includes required emulation code for ZPU.
* Bootstraps code from program flash (shadows into FPGA blockram)
* Serial programming of program flash.
* Serial reset (TODO)

3) Where does it run ?

First implementation was done on Spartan3E 500 (-4), on a S3E Starter Kit, with a M25P16 SPI flash ROM and 32Kbytes RAM.
Implemented sizes (approximate): 841 Slices ( 563 FF, 1094 LUT )
Running speed: 100MHz (50Mhz external clock + DCM)

Current implementation still runs at 100MHz.

I'll keep you posted about news here.

Álvaro