Designing SOCs with Configured Cores

Chapter 9. The Diamond 232L CPU Core

Some people have told me they don’t think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux.

—Linus Torvalds

The Diamond 232L CPU core is a general-purpose RISC processor core. Like the 212GP core, the Diamond 232L includes a cache controller but the Diamond 232L processor’s cache controller operates larger, 16-Kbyte, 4-way set-associative instruction and data caches. The Diamond 232L CPU also includes a demand-paged memory-management unit (MMU) with translation lookaside buffer (TLB) and memory protection to support large operating systems such as Linux. Even with these features, the Diamond 232L CPU runs at 233 MHz, consumes only 0.8 mm² of silicon, and dissipates approximately 212μ W/MHz when implemented ...