Have you ever thought of building your own processor or maybe just defining your own machine instructions? With eMIPS now you can.

The "extensible MIPS" is a dynamically extensible processor architecture that realizes the performance benefits of application-specific hardware optimizations in a general-purpose, multi-user system environment. It allows multiple secure Extensions to load dynamically and to plug into the stages of a pipelined data path, thereby extending the core instruction set of the microprocessor. Extensions can also be used to realize on-chip peripherals and if area permits even multiple cores. Extended Instructions can dramatically speedup application programs just by patching their binaries. The first eMIPS prototype is built out of a Xilinx FPGA using the ML401 board. It boots a small OS and runs real programs.

The first release of eMIPS is now available here (9MB zip file).

A slide deck with a project summary is here (2MB ppt file).

• Neil Pittman
• Alessandro Forin

• Nathaniel L. Lynch
• Hong Lu
• Bharat Sukhwani
• Karl Meier
• Giovanni Busonera

1. Pittman, R. N., Lynch, N. L., Forin, A. eMIPS, A Dynamically Extensible Processor, MSR-TR-2006-143, Microsoft Research, WA, October 2006.
2. Lu, H., Forin, A. The Design and Implementation of P2V, An Architecture for Zero-Overhead Online Verification of Software Programs, MSR-TR-2007-99, Microsoft Research, WA, August 2007.
3. Sukhwani, B., Forin, A., Pittman, R. N. Extensible On-Chip Peripherals, MSR-TR-2007-120, Microsoft Research, WA, September 2007.
4. Meier, K., Forin, A. MIPS-to-Verilog, Hardware Compilation for the eMIPS Processor, MSR-TR-2007-128, Microsoft Research, WA, September 2007.
5. Busonera, G., Forin, A. eBug: Debugging Extensions for the eMIPS Dynamically Extensible Processor., MSR-TR-2007-155, Microsoft Research, WA, November 2007.