MicroBlaze

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The MicroBlaze is a soft processor core from Xilinx for use in Xilinx FPGAs. A soft processor is a processor created out of the configurable logic in an FPGA. The MicroBlaze is based on a RISC architecture very similar to the DLX architecture described in a popular computer architecture book by Patterson and Hennessy. It features a 5-stage pipeline, with most instructions completing in a single cycle. Both instruction and data words are 32 bits. The MicroBlaze can reach speeds of up to 150MHz on the Virtex4 FPGA's family. This processor can connect to the OPB bus for access to a wide range of different modules. It can also communicate via the LMB bus for a fast access to local memory which is normally BRAM that are inside the FPGA.

Many aspects of the MicroBlaze can be configured at compile time owing to the configurable nature of FPGAs. Cache structure, peripherals, and interfaces can be customized to the application. In addition, hardware support for certain operations, such as multiplication, division, and floating-point arithmetic, can be added or removed.

Although lacking a Memory Management Unit, and thus unable to run full Linux, several operating systems have been ported to the MicroBlaze including µClinux and FreeRTOS.

Xilinx includes, as part of its MicroBlaze development package, a MicroBlaze GNU C Compiler (MB-GCC) which allows programmers to use the C programming language to write programs for the architecture.