miniMIPS

Main aspects

- The miniMIPS is a 32 bits core and has a Von Neumann architecture.

- The miniMIPS is 5-stage pipeline :
- Instruction extraction
- Instruction decoding
- Execution
- Memory access
- Update registers

- Only two instructions can access the memory. The others work on registers which are 32 bits large. The processor contains 32 registers.

- Data hazards are resolved thanks to a bypass unit.

- Branch hazards are resolved by predicting the address results.

- Interruptions and exceptions are taken in account thanks to a system coprocessor.

Assemblee

An assembly gasm is provided with the project to generate the binaries for the miniMIPS cores.
This program is developed by Samuel Hangouët and Louis-Marie Mouton.

Performance

The miniMIPS was integrated in an FPGA from Xilinx Xc2V1000-5fg456.

The processor speed is 50MHz. As at each cycle an instruction ends (except when there are stalls), that means 50 million instructions per second.

The processor is used as a free example in the XSmart-ICE product (a generic emulator for core) from the french society Raisonance based in Grenoble.

Description

The project miniMIPS is a processor core based on the MIPS I architecture.

The project is born during a school project at the ENSERG (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Electronique et de Radioélectricité de Grenoble), France.

The main contributors are Samuel Hangouët, Sébastien Jan, Louis-Marie Mouton and Olivier Schneider.