23 lines
1.4 KiB
TeX
23 lines
1.4 KiB
TeX
In early 2018, more than a year before the official start of the project, after
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searching for a subject for the diploma thesis, the idea of building a computer
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from scratch has come up. Multiple suggestions on how to implement it and the
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scope of the project were gathered. Originally the goal of the project was to
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have a computer which would consist of seperate plug-in cards on each of which
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one instruction would reside. This would debunk the mystery behind the ``black
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box`` which processors are today.
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Most processors today are only documented on the execution of their programs and
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not on their internals. The projects aim was later redirected, due to concerns
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about the difficulty of the project, to build a processor in VHDL instead. After
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several months of implementation time the project was split into two parts: the
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peripherals and the core processor. During the development processes and after
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rememberingthe original goal to make a processor understandable, the
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peripherals changed from being implemented in VHDL back to hardware, which came
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with increased work but would result in a far more understandable final product.
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The decision for a RISC-V based processor was made at the beginning of the
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project, because the core architecture is well documented, modular and almost
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any part not implemented inside the processor(if not specifically
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required by the software) should be emulateable in software.
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