A comparison and performance evaluation of FPGA soft-cores for embedded multi-core systems

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are increasingly being considered as an effective solution to cope with current performance requirements of embedded systems due to their reconfigurability, scalability and their lower cost solution. The increasing configurable logic capacity of the FPGA has enabled designers to integrate a large number of soft-core processors into FPGA devices. Evaluating the performance of existing soft-cores presents a great challenge for designers to select the most efficient and the suitable soft-core for a specific software application. This paper presents an overview of soft-core processors that are used in embedded systems. We compare different open-source and commercial soft-cores such as openFire, LEON3, Microblaze, etc, based on major architectural features. We also evaluate the impact of the selected soft-core processors on the total execution time and the FPGA area consumption using different applications.