How to Build your own Processor
in Five Minutes or Less
If you are in the habit of using Microcontrollers, then you are probably familiar with the Microcontroller Selector guides.
There are so many to choose from with Atmel, STMicro, and Analog Devices, among others. Armed with your trusty shopping list of things you need in your design, you shop for the right menu combination.
Memory, interfaces, clocks, ADC. That's when you find you only need a 16-bit counter, but that micro only has UART and SPI interfaces, and not I2C or 10/100. Okay, I can add another couple of chips to the system, but board space sure is tight. Well, at least I don't have to worry about I/O. That reminds me, what packages are available for this micro? 144 pin maximum? That's not enough! Ugh, there must be a better way...
What if you had a soft processor?
The same one you were planning to use (say an ARM7 or a Cortex) and a menu of peripherals that you could mix and match to build your ideal processor. You have a reprogrammable device to program it to and begin developing code with the ability to create a custom prototype the following day. Not to mention, when marketing changes everything half-way through the design, you can just reprogram and keep going.
