nanoSoC 2023/4

The first tape out of the nanoSoC Cortex M0 based SoC Reference Design. This reference design provides a simple microcontroller system appropriate to host and support the development and evaluation of research IP blocks or subsystems. It supports seamless transition from FPGA to physical silicon implementation utilising a memory-mapped experimental hardware subsystem.

The SoC is configuratble and includes a Cortex-M0, boot monitor, Instruction and Data SRAMs, system peripherals (UART, GPIO, system counter timers and clocks), memory mapped expansion space (for experimental IP), 2-banks of SRAM expansion region, a DMA (either PL230 or DMA350 supported) and an ASCII debug protocol agent (or ADP).

The 2023/24 version of the reference design has been used to tape the following projects to date:

• Fast-kNN: A hardware implementation of a k-Nearest-Neighbours classifier for accelerated inference by Epifanios Baikas
• Hell Fire SoC by Srimanth Tenneti