Brigham Young University BYU ScholarsArchive Theses and Dissertations 2015-07-01 An Evaluation of Soft Processors as a Reliable Computing Platform Michael Robert Gardiner Brigham Young University - Provo Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd Part of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons BYU ScholarsArchive Citation Gardiner, Michael Robert, "An Evaluation of Soft Processors as a Reliable Computing Platform" (2015). Theses and Dissertations. 5509. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/5509 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. An Evaluation of Soft Processors as a Reliable Computing Platform Michael Robert Gardiner A thesis submitted to the faculty of Brigham Young University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science Michael J. Wirthlin, Chair Brad L. Hutchings Brent E. Nelson Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Brigham Young University July 2015 Copyright © 2015 Michael Robert Gardiner All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT An Evaluation of Soft Processors as a Reliable Computing Platform Michael Robert Gardiner Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, BYU Master of Science This study evaluates the benefits and limitations of soft processors operating in a radiation-hardened FPGA, focusing primarily on the performance and reliability of these systems. FPGAs designs for four popular soft processors, the MicroBlaze, LEON3, Cortex- M0 DesignStart, and OpenRISC 1200 are developed for a Virtex-5 FPGA. The performance of these soft processor designs is then compared on ten widely-used benchmark programs.