The Nano Processor : a Low Resource Recon gurable

Reconngurable logic systems approach the performance of Application-Speciic Integrated Circuits (ASICs) while retaining much of the generality of conventional computing systems through reconnguration. Unfortunately, the development of these systems, unlike conventional software systems, is hardware intensive , requiring signiicant hardware development time. One way to introduce a more exible development approach is to implement a customizable stored-program processor. For a given application, the designer can develop customized hardware to increase performance and then control the sequencing and operation of this hardware with software. Development time can be sig-niicantly reduced because conventional software development tools, e.g., assemblers and compilers, can be used to quickly develop new applications on the cus-tomized processor. This paper presents the Nano Processor (nP), a fully customizable reconngurable processor , together with its integrated assembler, that has been successfully implemented on the Xilinx 3000 series Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA).