Research And Implementation Of Embedded System Based On Multi-core Stack Processor

Along with the rapid development of embedded system, the design of embedded processor hasencountered many challenges, such as high degree parallelism support, rapid response capability andscalability etc. Stack processor, which has hardware supported stack, simple hardware and instructionstructure, efficient subroutine call, highly modularized software program, good system scalability, issuitable as the processor of embedded system. With the development in embedded system, single corestack processor couldn’t meet the stricter requirement of multi-thread and multi-task in embeddedsystem any more.This paper introduces a SoPC embedded system with a dual core stack processor to overcomethe shortcoming of single core stack processor. The following two aspects of work were done in theprocessor design: single core stack processor’s optimization, dual core stack processor’simplementation. For the stack core optimization, a novel branch instruction data path with higherexecuting efficiency is designed by data pre-fetch technique. What’s more, the Harvard architectureand address pregenerating structurewere adopted for the processor. In dual core processor design, astack-based mailbox designed for inter-core communication is introduced. Besides, a SoPC system isbuilt base on Xilinx’s EDK and dual core stack processor. Finally, the system is verified onXC5VLX110T FPGA.The processor is designed by Verilog Hardware Description Language and uses Modelsim as thefunction simulation tool. Finally, the processor is tested in Xilinx’s XC5VLX110T FPGA. The resultshows that the single core processor could run up to209.8MHz, which is better than other similarprocessors. While being tested on FPGA, dual core SoPC works well.