MCIP: High configurable 8-bit microcontroller IP-core

Intellectual Property (IP) cores represent the heart of the most advanced controller designed systems. In this work, a well-structured microcontroller IP-core named MCIP for "Microcontroller IP" is developed to provide not only major functionalities and features of a powerful microcontroller but to serve as a versatile tool for developing and validating new design research techniques with complex configurations and environment. MCIP is fully compatible with Microchip PIC18 family; it is presented as a configurable core which supports a variety of program and data memory sizes, easily adapted to any PIC18 device, and executes any developed program on assembly code or high level language. Performed evaluations have shown that MCIP is the fastest among evaluated 8-bit microcontrollers. In addition, the design was downloaded and tested on different FPGA platforms. Then through the MCIP versatile configuration features, the two main RFID components, tag and reader, have been developed and evaluated on Digilent Genesys Virtex-5 and Avnet Spartan-6 boards.