A survey of open source processors for FPGAs

FPGA-based SoCs have been gaining great favors among traditional applications and expanding the application domains to some new areas. Reusing and sharing components is an attractive and pratical methodology for system designers to reduce the design complexity of the SoC architectures. Open source hardware has become an effective method of improving the design productivity. As the core functional component, processors affects the performance of SoC systems. This paper investigates existing open source processors, and gives an overview. From the points of usability and stability, the main features of open source processors are summarized. Following these features, some open source processors with high usability and stability are selected. These open source processors and existing vendor-provided soft processors are implemented on Stratix V and Virtex-7 FPGAs using corresponding EDA tools, Quart us n and ISE. The implementation results are compared and discussed.