Saturday, 14 December 2019

Icebreaker board arrived

Yesterday my IceBreaker board arrived. Actually, my second one because the first one appeared to have some technical issues. 1bitSquared quickly sent me a new one however and this one seems to be functioning fine.

The board looks a bit different though although the silk screen still says version 1.0e. There are now two additional 'ears' to the break off section of the board, probably to allow for even more gpio pins. I will have to investigate that latter. But I am happy already that I can compile and run the designs from https://github.com/icebreaker-fpga/icebreaker-examples without issues.

CPU design

The CPU design as currently implemented largely follows the diagram shown below. It features a 16 x 32bit register file and 16 bit instructi...