Hi everyone,

I'm currently laying down the architecture of an FPGA which is the main 
controller for a set of mechanisms and we wanted to profit of an amba 
ahb to interconnect various elements [1], included a slightly modified 
microblaze core (MB) with an additional floating point unit.

The system does need to have an overall controller/sequencer or whatever 
you want to call it in order to coordinate the various subsystems 
(included the MB) in a sort of repeated cycle.

The above mentionned controller can be written with a simple state 
machine, but now that we want to interconnect everything with an ahb we 
have to be compliant to it.

I have found recently that microsemi provides an IP called CoreABC which 
is a sort of lightweight processor which may be trimmed down to execute 
a very limited set of the microcode and can be interfaced with the bus.

Does anyone here have some experience with it? Is it recommended for 
this type of scenario or we would be better of with a simple FSM which 
can handle the ahb protocol?

Any suggestion/comment/rant is appreciated.

Al

[1] the decision is motivated to reduce the amount of integration time 
and optimize the verification effort since last project we ended up with 
a maze of wires all interwined and with an infinite work spent on 
numerous testbenches.

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