Soft microprocessor

A soft microprocessor (also called softcore microprocessor or a soft processor) is a microprocessor core that can be wholly implemented using logic synthesis. It can be implemented via different semiconductor devices containing programmable logic (e.g., FPGA, CPLD), including both high-end and commodity variations.

Most systems, if they use a soft processor at all, only use a single soft processor. However, a few designers tile as many soft cores onto an FPGA as will fit. In those multi-core systems, rarely used resources can be shared between all the cores in a cluster.

While many people put exactly one soft microprocessor on a FPGA, a sufficiently large FPGA can hold two or more soft microprocessors, resulting in a multi-core processor. The number of soft processors on a single FPGA is limited only by the size of the FPGA. Some people have put dozens or hundreds of soft microprocessors on a single FPGA. This is one way to implement massive parallelism in computing and can likewise be applied to in-memory computing.

A soft microprocessor and its surrounding peripherals implemented in a FPGA is less vulnerable to obsolescence than a discrete processor.

• System-on-a-chip (SoC)
  • Network-on-a-chip (NoC)
• Reconfigurable computing
  • Field-programmable gate array (FPGA)
• VHDL
• Verilog
  • SystemVerilog
• Hardware acceleration

• Soft CPU Cores for FPGA
• Detailed Comparison of 12 Soft Microprocessors
• FPGA CPU News
• Freedom CPU website
• Microprocessor cores on Opencores.org (Expand the "Processor" tab)
• NikTech 32 bit RISC Microprocessor MANIK.