Rapid-prototyping of high-performance RISC cores with VHDL

The authors present some experiences they have obtained in the conception and description of a SPARC v8 IU core to be embedded in custom applications. Its design has been carried out using VHDL-based tools such as Synopsys for debugging and synthesis, and Cascade's Epoch for the final implementation stage. These experiences have been gathered into a proposed methodology for the rapid design of high-performance embeddable cores.