Leros: A Tiny Microcontroller for FPGAs

Leros is a tiny microcontroller that is optimized for current low-cost FPGAs. Leros is designed with a balanced logic to on-chip memory relation. The design goal is a microcontroller that can be clocked in about half of the speed a pipelined on-chip memory and consuming less than 300 logic cells. The architecture, which follows from the design goals, is a pipelined 16-bit accumulator processor. An implementation of Leros needs at least one on-chip memory block and a few hundred logic cells. The application areas of Leros are twofold: First, it can be used as an intelligent peripheral device for auxiliary functions in an FPGA based system-on-chip design. Second, the very small size of Leros makes it an attractive soft core for many-core research with low-cost FPGAs.