uCode

Documentation Status

A toy project for turning user-defined assembly-like programs into synthesisable verilog code. This verilog code can then be implemented on an FPGA.

More information on what this tool might be used for is found here. There is also a walkthrough example here.

Aims

The aim for this project is to allow people to define a set of their own assembly-like micro-instructions using a very simple syntax. Using these definitions, they can then write programs which are then transpiled into a verilog state-machine. These programs then communicate with the outside world using custom IO ports.

Progress

Currently, one can use the tool to:

  • Define arbitrary instructions, with arguments and their own set of operations on those arguments.
  • Define arbitrary inputs and outputs to the micro-code program, known as ports.
  • Define global state variables which the instructions can access and modify.
  • Write assembly-like programs, with basic blocks, instructions and conditional jumps between those blocks.

Within each block, instructions can read and write the program ports, as well as the global state variables.

Documentation

All documentation is found in the docs/ folder of the project. These same files are also hosted on microcoder.readthedocs.io.

Examples

There are some simple examples bundled with the repository:

Counter - This is a really boring counter which simply counts down from 10 and then loops. Forever.

$> make all run EXAMPLE=count

Fibonacci - This program takes an n value, and computes the n‘th number in the Fibonacci sequence.

$> make all run EXAMPLE=fibonacci

DMA - An example of a DMA memcopy co-processor which coppies multiple words from one memory base address to another.

$> make all run EXAMPLE=dma

The output wave files for both examples are written to work/waves.vcd. This can be viewed using a program like GTKWave.