Understanding Embedded Microcontrollers

Microcontrollers are processors that are useful for small tasks that can be reconfigured fairly easily. They aren’t able to play Crysis or have high benchmark scores; in fact, they likely won’t support floating points. But they do allow us to run small, lightweight tasks without the time and complexity of developing hardware. In fact, if you were to look at some of the more advanced Xilinx cores, like the DDR4 controller, they use a MicroBlaze processor to handle the state machine aspects of the memory initialization process.

The Xilinx MicroBlaze processor is a configurable 32-bit processor that can be instanced as a simple microcontroller all the way to a full-blown processor capable of running Linux. In this chapter, we will be looking at the embedded aspects of it.

That said, FPGAs truly shine when you implement custom logic. This allows parallelization, pipelining, and custom interfaces to application-specific devices...