I spent some time yesterday fidding with the Beeb Accelerator design (which is currently using Arlet's original design, with the BigEd/Hoglet C02 extentions).
I spotted a couple of signals in Beeb Accelerator that looked like they could be pipelined, and this improved the maximum clock speed from 80MHz to 90MHz. This didn't involve any CPU core changes at all.
The critical paths then seem to be a mix of:
- Block RAM => DI => ALU (passing through the BCD logic) => Carry Out Register
- Block RAM => DI => ABL/ABH => nextAddress => Block RAM
I was wondering if there was any merrit in exploring an ALU design that makes use of the DSP48A slice? Or is this obviously a non-starter?
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dsp48a1.png [ 95.94 KiB | Viewed 901 times ]
https://www.xilinx.com/support/document ... /ug389.pdfClearly the BCD path would need to be seperate, and this may be the stumbling block. But in the C02 there is an extra cycle available for BCD anyway, isn't there?
Dave