| Microwatt | |
| Produced-Start: | 2019-08-29[1] |
| Designfirm: | IBM, OpenPOWER Foundation |
| Arch: | Power ISA 3.0 ppc64le ppc64be |
| Numcores: | 1 |
| Application: | Soft core |
Microwatt is an open source soft processor core originally written in VHDL by Anton Blanchard at IBM, announced at the OpenPOWER Summit NA 2019[2] and published on GitHub in August 2019. It adheres to the Power ISA 3.0 instruction set and can be run on FPGA boards, booting Linux, MicroPython and Zephyr.[3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Microwatt is a tiny 64-bit bi-endian scalar integer processor core, implementing a subset of the Power ISA 3.0 instruction set. It has 32× 64-bit general purpose registers and 32x 64-bit floating-point registers. It uses Wishbone for the memory interface.
The initial development was done in a couple of months, included the entire integer processing functionality of the instruction set; the bare minimum to make it compliant, with no memory management unit (MMU) and no floating-point unit.
Later additions to the implementation includes JTAG debugger interface, divider instructions, 16 KB instruction and 32 KB data caches, a non-hypervisor-capable MMU, pipelining and floating-point support.[9]
It's designed using VHDL 2008 and the GHDL simulation environment.
A sibling project called Chiselwatt is another open processor core implementing the Power ISA 3.0 instruction set, written in the Scala-based Chisel instead of VHDL.[10] [11]
It is the first processor written from scratch using the open Power ISA 3.0, and is released by the OpenPOWER Foundation as a reference design.
The project started as a demo, proof of concept and a reference implementation for the release of the opensource initiative regarding Power ISA 3.0.[15] The goal for Blanchard was to see if he could make it, and as a software developer, taking on a very low level hardware project was a challenge.
Microwatt is set to be fabricated in 130 nm by Efabless "Open MPW Shuttle Program" in 2021.[16] As of February 2024, there has been no update on the progress of fabrication on Efabless's Microwatt project page.[17]