The SpartanMC is a soft-core processor and the heart of a
SoC-Kit for FPGAs. Typical processors for SoC design are 8 or
32 bit cores. Small bit widths has the advantage of a small
resource footprint for simple applications, but that also
imply a limited complexity. Wide instructions enables much more
complex applications, but will also require large amounts of
memory even for small applications. The SpartanMC fills the gap
between those extremes with an 18 bit processor which aims at
applications of medium complexity. Since modern FPGAs use 18
bit width arithmetic units and memory the SpartanMC fits those
hardware structure perfectly.
SpartanMC Features
The SpartanMC SoC-Kit delivers a full development environment for
FPGA based SoCs which can be used by developers even if they have
no detial knowledge about FPGAs. It contains a synthesizeable
18 bit processor core, a wide range of typical peripheral
components and a software toolchain (GCC, BinUtils). Moreover,
it supports the designer with a cycle accurate simulator and
a graphical system builder application.