High-level implementation of an ARM7 microprocessor with multicore capabilities

This paper presents an implemention of an ARM7 microprocessor with multicore capabilities. The required modifications to support multiprocessing include: the addition of atomic instructions to the instruction set and the addition of a bus interface. The implementation resulted to a 170% power overhead and a decrease in area by 61% compared with the single core implementation of the ARM7 microprocessor in the laboratory. The maximum allowable frequency attained was 17 MHz, an improvement from the previous implementation´s 10 MHz.