Design And Implementation Of FPGA Hardware Emulation Platform And MIPS Chipset

This thesis can be divided into 2 parts: design and development of a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) emulation platform, design and implementation of a MIPS microprocessor compatible chipset.Compared with software simulation, Hardware emulation has much faster speed. Moreover, bugs are often easily found by emulation because it is closer to the real world. As a consequence, hardware emulation plays an important role in modern VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) verification process. In this thesis, a universal FPGA emulation platform is designed, which can work independently or cooperatively with a computer. Besides this, this emulation platform has a satisfactory performance and flexibility.Chipset is the key element in a computer system, which connect the microprocessor and peripheral devices, such as SDRAM, PCI devices et al. In this thesis, a survey is given on MIPS microprocessor compatible chipset and a chipset architecture is brought forward. This architecture supports enough functions to MIPS microprocessor and is easy to implement. Moreover, this architecture is flexible to upgrade, various IP (Intellectual Property) cores can be added to provide different functions. Based on this architecture, all modules have been almost finished.This thesis makes contribution to the following two areas:Design and implement a universal FPGA emulation platform.Design and implement a MIPS microprocessor compatible chipset.