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Pico E-15 Hardware Reference
www.picocomputing.com
Pico Computing
(206) 283-2178
150 Nickerson Street. Suite 311
Seattle, WA 98109
9
PowerPC™ Processor
PPC405x3 Processor Introduction:
FPGAs are renowned for their ability to process parallel logic, but they typically have a hard
time emulating a high performance processor. To get the best of both worlds the Virtex-4™
features an embedded Power PC Processor. Since the processor shares the same die as the
FPGA it seamlessly interfaces with the FPGA fabric.
A new feature of the Virtex-4 FPGA is the addition of an auxiliary processor interface. The APU
is the highest speed interface between the PowerPC™ processor and the FPGA fabric. Up to
four custom instructions may be implemented in the FPGA, which are accessible from the
PowerPC™.
Board support packages are currently available for
µ
C/OS and Linux. Board support source
code is available open source under the GPL.