120-core microAptiv MIPS Overlay for the Terasic DE5-NET FPGA board

Abstract

We design a 120-core 94MHz MIPS processor FPGA over-lay interconnected with a lightweight message-passing fabric that fits on a Stratix V GX FPGA (5SGXEA7N2F45C2). We use silicon-tested RTL source code for the microAptiv MIPS processor made available under the Imagination Technologies Academic Program. We augment the processor with suitable custom instruction extensions for moving data between the cores via explicit message passing. We support these instructions with a communication scratchpad that is optimized for high throughput injection of network traffic. We also demonstrate an end-to-end proof of-concept flow that compiles C code with suitable MIPS UDI-supported (user-defined instructions) message passing workloads and stress-test with synthetic workloads.