Xilinx PowerPC (PPC405A)
The PPC405A is a 32-bit Wishbone-compatible RISC processor, for use in FPGA designs targeting the Xilinx® Virtex®-II Pro family of physical FPGA devices.
Although placed in an Altium Designer-based FPGA project as a PPC405A, this is essentially a Wishbone-compliant wrapper that allows use of the 'hard' PowerPC® (PPC405) processor core immersed in the target physical device.
Most instructions are 32-bits wide and execute in a single clock cycle. In addition to fast register access, the PPC405A features a user-definable amount of zero-wait state block RAM, with true dual-port access.
As the PPC405 is immersed in a Virtex-II Pro device, only designs targeting this device may make use of the processor. Should you wish the freedom of a device and FPGA Vendor-independent 32-bit system hardware platform, use the available TSK3000A 32-bit RISC processor.
Supply of these soft cores under the terms and conditions of the Altium End-User License Agreement does not convey nor imply any patent rights to the supplied technologies. Users are cautioned that a license may be required for any use covered by such patent rights.
Features at-a-glance
- 5-stage pipelined RISC processor
- Internal Harvard architecture with simplified external memory access
- 4GByte address space
- Wishbone I/O and memory ports for simplified peripheral connection
- Full Viper-based software development tool chain – C compiler/assembler/source-level debugger/profiler
- C-code compatible with other Altium Designer 8-bit and 32-bit Wishbone-compliant processor cores, for easy design migration
For further information on PPC405 features, refer to the datasheet for the Virtex-II Pro and Virtex-II Pro X Platform FPGAs (DS083.pdf), available from the Xilinx website.
Availability
From an OpenBus System document, the PPC405A processor can be found in the Processors region of the OpenBus Palette panel.
From a schematic document, the PPC405A processor can be found in the FPGA 32-Bit Processors integrated library (FPGA 32-Bit Processors.IntLib), located in the \Library\Fpga folder of the installation.
32-bit Processor FundamentalsDebugging | Working with the PPC405AFor detailed information about the hardware and functionality of the underlying PPC405A core processor, including internal registers, refer to the PowerPC Processor Reference Guide and PowerPC 405 Processor Block Reference Guide, both available from www.xilinx.com. The Instruction Set section of the PowerPC Processor Reference Guide provides detailed information with respect to the processor's instruction set, including instruction encoding and an alphabetical listing of all instructions by mnemonic. |