Multiple PicoBlazes – Review and Implementation

A soft-core processor is a hardware description language (HDL) model of a specific processor (CPU) that can be customized for a given application and synthesized for an FPGA target. The PicoBlaze is an 8 bit soft core processor, designed to efficiently map on available FPGA resources including block memories and distributed memories as well. The single PicoBlaze can implement simple designs like data manipulation or with smaller applications. To develop complex designs one possible solution is to divide processing requirements into several instances of PicoBlaze. An issue will arise if these instances have to communicate together which is a common practice. The question is how to connect these instances efficiently in terms of software handling, speed, and hardware resources. In this paper a sample design of how to connect multiple PicoBlaze instances in one design is presented. Keywords— FPGA, KCPSM3, PicoBlaze, Switching Matrix, Soft Core Processor.