A comparison of microcontrollers targeted to FPGA-based embedded applications

There is available today a large amount of microcontroller cores to the embedded market, ranging from classical architectures like the 8051 to RISC or DSP machines. The choice among different architectures depends of parameters like speed, power installed base, amount of possible reuse and other technical issues. This paper will make a comparison of 3 different architectures targeted to FPGA-based systems. Our main contribution is the development of a Java ASIP microcontroller, which allows good area-speed compromise, while maintaining low software development costs, which are ever increasing for embedded systems.