Software/Hardware Co-design: Crypto MicroCore

Abstract

MicroCore is a dual stack, Harvard architecture with three memory areas that can be accessed in parallel. One special feature of MicroCore is the possibility to define more complex Forth words by creating new CPU instructions that later can be implemented via VHDL in FPGA hardware. In our project we developed a new version of the MicroCore C-compiler based on lcc, a fully ANSI-C compliant compiler. The compiler generates from C-Code MicroCore instructions for the 1.71 version which are sent to the target hardware with the MicroForth-loader. We built in optimizations for the global stack allocations, first suggested by the group of Chris Bayley at the University of York. We tested our compiler with the BLAKE hash algorithm, implemented both in compiled MicroCore code and with BLAKE-optimized instructions directly coded in hardware via VHDL.