README.md

ppcpu_caravel

Pipelined pcpu synthetised on silicon for OpenMPW shuttle.

Edition: gfmpw1

ppcpu

PPCPU is a pipelined procesor made entirely from scratch. It uses custom RISC-type ISA.

PPCPU is a third revision of pcpu project (that started in 2019) that is an advanced and functional processor. It is capable of running full operating systems (like piOS), with complete process isolation. LLVM backend PPCPU is available.

This design is integrated with two PPCPU cores, data cache, instruction caches, CW bus and embedded module.

Main cpu bus is exported to I/O pins as CW (Compressed Wishbone (due to pin count limitations)) bus. It allows to connect large external memory and many peripherals to the projects.

Addtionaly, embedded module is available, with internal memory that can be programmed with SPI interface. It allows to test the project without connecting main CW bus, in "microcontroller" mode. SPI inteface provides access to main system bus.

Features

  • 16-bit custom RISC type architecture
  • 4-stage pipelined microarchitecture
  • Multi-core operation (with two cores included in this project)
  • Memory paging, virtualization and protection
  • 24-bit supported address space
  • Full main memory bus available via I/O pins as Compressed Wishbone bus.
  • Instruction and data caches
  • Interrupts
  • Production testing embedded mode

Tests

This CPU configuration (wrapped in SoC) is fully functional and tested on a real-world FPGA circuit.

Test testing boot and basic operation of core via Caravel I/O intefaces (CW bus and embed mode) are located in verilog/dv/. See dv README for details about dv tests in this repository.

Structure

  [CORE 0]<->[I&D MMU]<->[                      ]     [                    ] <>  [    MAIN OUTSIDE CW BUS            ]
                         [  INNER_INTERCONNECT  ] <-> [ OUTER_INTERCONNECT ] 
  [CORE 1]<->[I&D MMU]<->[                      ]     [ +CLOCKING & CDC    ] <>  [EMBEDDED MODULE - SPI TO WB BRIDGE,]
                          ^v         ^v        ^v                                [INTERNAL RAM, GPIO                 ]
                      [ICACHE 0] [ICACHE 1] [DCACHE]

  | CORE | INTERNAL BUS             |           WISHBONE BUS    |  COMPRESSED WISHBONE BUS                            |

Pins

GPIO DIR FUNCTION
7:0 BI Memory mapped GPIO pins, available to PPCPU. Some of the pins are reserved by Caravel during boot
8 OUT cw_req: Compressed Wishbone bus - Start of request
9 OUT cw_dir: Compressed Wishbone bus - Direction of cw_io
25:10 BI cw_io: Compressed Wishbone bus - Multi-cycle address & bidirectional data
26 IN cw_ack: Compressed Wishbone bus - request ack
27 IN cw_err: Compressed Wishbone bus - request error
28 OUT const 1
29 OUT cw_rst: Core reset signal
30 IN external interrupt
31 IN Enable split of CW clock from CORE clock (divisor configurable via MMIO)
32 IN Hold core operations
33 IN Enabled embed mode
34 IN SPI interface clk
35 IN SPI interface MOSI
36 OUT SPI interface MISO
37 OUT cw_clk: CW clock ouput

Docs

ISA and core documentation is available in main PPCPU repository.

cpuid for this tapeout: 1110(silicon)_0011_0011(arch3.3)_0000(si/to0)

Author

PPCPU by Piotr Wegrzyn

Thanks for amazing Open Source tools and projects that made this possible!