Conversion of an 8-bit to a 16-bit Soft-core RISC Processor

The demand for 8-bit processors nowadays is still going strong despite efforts by manufacturers in producing higher end microcontroller solutions to the mass market. Low-end processor offers a simple, low-cost and fast solution especially on I/O applications development in embedded system. However, due to architectural constraint, complex calculation could not be performed efficiently on 8-bit processor. This paper presents the conversion method from an 8-bit to a 16-bit Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) processor in a soft-core reconfigurable platform in order to extend its capability in handling larger data sets thus enabling intensive calculations process. While the conversion expands the data bus width to 16-bit, it also maintained the simple architecture design of an 8-bit processor.The expansion also provides more room for improvement to the processor’s performance. The modified architecture is successfully simulated in CPUSim together with its new instruction set architecture (ISA). Xilinx Virtex-6 platform is utilized to execute and verified the architecture. Results show that the modified 16-bit RISC architecture only required 17% more register slice on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation which is a slight increase compared to the original 8-bit RISC architecture. A test program containing instruction sets that handle 16-bit data are also simulated and verified. As the 16-bit architecture is described as a soft-core, further modifications could be performed in order to customize the architecture to suit any specific applications.