Hi everyone,
I'm currently laying down the architecture of an FPGA which is the main controller for a set of mechanisms and we wanted to profit of an amba ahb to interconnect various elements [1], included a slightly modified microblaze core (MB) with an additional floating point unit.
The system does need to have an overall controller/sequencer or whatever you want to call it in order to coordinate the various subsystems (included the MB) in a sort of repeated cycle.
The above mentionned controller can be written with a simple state machine, but now that we want to interconnect everything with an ahb we have to be compliant to it.
I have found recently that microsemi provides an IP called CoreABC which is a sort of lightweight processor which may be trimmed down to execute a very limited set of the microcode and can be interfaced with the bus.
Does anyone here have some experience with it? Is it recommended for this type of scenario or we would be better of with a simple FSM which can handle the ahb protocol?
Any suggestion/comment/rant is appreciated.
Al
[1] the decision is motivated to reduce the amount of integration time and optimize the verification effort since last project we ended up with a maze of wires all interwined and with an infinite work spent on numerous testbenches.