MIPSfpga programme opens up the MIPS architecture to universities worldwide

By Robert Owen - Imagination Blog, Apr. 27, 2015 – 

Please please please don?t obfuscate it! said a famous professor when I mentioned the outline of MIPSfpga, an exciting project part of the Imagination University Programme (IUP) I was working on at the time.

The journey from IP to real hardware

I?m a hardware guy by background. For me a tool is a solid object, usually a board with a processor in the middle. So when I arrived in the world of IP, it took some time to get used to the idea that a tool was a piece of software. It was also a challenge to get used to the idea of teaching computer architectures ? how could people get so excited by a five stage pipeline and the purity of a RISC architecture?

Then I read the wonderful book Digital Design and Computer Architecture by Dr. David Harris and Dr. Sarah Harris. Here was something I could relate to: logic gates! And they led me gently into the concept of micro-architectures. Then it began to dawn on me, this MIPS stuff is really fundamental!

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