Emulation of a microcontrollers on an FPGA

[Yaro]

Hi all,

I've a question about possibility to emulate small microcontrollers on fpga. I place this question becouse sometimes I find C codes that are really complex and difficult to convert them to VHDL code. If there is possibility to emulate a microprocessor or a part of it inside an FPGA that would solve this problem. Another alternative it's some kind of converter of C code to VHDL code if exist.
I found only ARM microprocessors(not emulated) inside FPGA. The only emulation I've found it's an arduino AVR emulated on FPGA.

Someone know where I can find more informations?

Thank you!

 

[TrickyDicky]

Altera has the Nios soft processor core, that you can use via the Qsys tool inside Quartus.

 

[Yaro]

I forgot to specify for an opensource code, I found different soft cores from FPGA producers, but most of them are not editable.

 

[TrickyDicky]

In that case, your only option will probably be to find someones hobby project on opencores.org
Wikipedia also has a list of open source CPUS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_computing_hardware

Good luck though - support for these things is usually pretty poor.

 

[dpaul]

Even if you find a working core from OpenCores, you might not find a good tool-chain for that core. That is a big problem for writing test-cases and applications for that core.

If you are willing to spend some bucks, a good one is the Leon3 MIPS processor:
https://www.gaisler.com/index.php/products/processors/leon3