ardis196658 / lispmicrocontroller

A microcontroller that natively executes a simple LISP dialect

This is a simple microcontroller that runs a compiled LISP dialect. Details of operation are in the wiki.

Running in simulation

This has been tested with Icarus Verilog (http://iverilog.icarus.com/), although other tool flows are probably similar. Tests can be run as follows:

Automated tests

    make test 

Tests are located in the tests/ directory. The test runner will search files for 'CHECK:'. The output of the program will be compared to whatever comes after this declaration. If they do not match, an error will be flagged.

Manually running a program

• Compile the LISP sources.
  This will produce two files: program.hex, which has the raw program machine code and is loaded by the simulator, and program.lst, which is informational and shows details of the generated code. For example:

    ./compile.py tests/test1.lisp

Note that any writes to register index 0 will be printed to standard out by the simulation test harness, which is how most simulation tests work.

• Run simulation.
  The simulator will read rom.hex each time it starts.

    vvp sim.vvp

Running in hardware

This has only been tested under Quartus/Altera with the Cyclone II starter kit. There are a couple of projects located under the fpga/ directory:

• 7seg: simple program that displays numbers on the 4-digit, 7 segment display
• game: a little arcade-style demo with animated sprites

To build:

• Compile the LISP sources.
  These are located in the project directory, but must be compiled from the top directory. For example, from LispMicrocontroller/

    ./compile.py fpga/game/game.lisp
  

  rom.hex will be created in the top level LispMicrocontroller/ directory.

• Synthesize the design Open the program file (for example, fpga/game/game.qpf). Note that the synthesis tools will read rom.hex to create the values for program ROM. If you recompile the LISP sources (thereby changing rom.hex), the design must be re-synthesized.

• Run using the programmer included with Quartus.