Wow, not only FPGA-optimized Cortex-M1, they also releases Cortex-M3, one of the most popular MCU IP.
BTW, are there many applications integrating a MCU core with FPGA rather than a AP core? I only have seen Xilinx products that uses Cortex-A core.
BTW, are there many applications integrating a MCU core with FPGA rather than a AP core? I only have seen Xilinx products that uses Cortex-A core.
I’ve seen cases with relatively complex pure HW FSM being replace by a small CPU and 1KB of RAM where the logic used by the CPU ends up smaller than the FSM.
But now the CPU is programmable, so you can iterate much quicker in case of bugs, without the need to reaunthesize.
A good example are SDRAM controllers: almost all of them have a small CPU inside the controller that is used for calibration training.
It's common enough that you'll have them available as part of the FPGA toolchain , Xilinx has Picoblaze/Microblaze and Altera has NIOS-II