[HWPE] Microcode

[lukamac]

Hello,

I found a word document describing the HWPE Interface Specification, Rev 1.2, written in January 2018. by Francesco Conti.
I would like to use the microcode capabilities of the HWPE so I read there, since in the online Interface specification I couldn't find anything about it.
In this document, there was a mention of a Pythong script ucode_compile.py that should be able to compile some high-level code for the microcode processor.
Unfortunately, I could not find it so I have a few questions now.

Is the Microcode processor in the HWPE usable?
Is there somewhere such a "compiler" for microcode?
If it should be hardcoded, is there a specification of the instruction encoding? I found very little information about this in the document.

Thank you in advance!

[kgf]

Hello,

I am not sure if this helps, but Francesco was working on the following documentation:
https://hwpe-doc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[lukamac]

Hello,

I am not sure if this helps, but Francesco was working on the following documentation:
 https://hwpe-doc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Thank you for your reply!

It does not help me. This is the online interface specification that I was referring to and in it, there is no mention of microcode.
Hopefully, it will be added later.

[fconti]

Hi lukamac, the ucode is "usable" but not 100% tested. The documentation you found in the old DOCX document is still valid, although I will be expanding it in the near future (I hope).
I suggest you start from here https://github.com/pulp-platform/hwpe-tb (a standalone testbench for our example HWPE). Once setup, you will find the ucode "compiler" and source code in the ips/hwpe-mac/ucode folder.

[lukamac]

Thank you fconti!
I will try that.