POWER OpenISA and Microwatt introduction
summary
OpenPOWER ISA becomes royalty free in August 2019 and a tiny reference core Microwatt implements the 64‑bit base subset in VHDL 2008, simulates with GHDL and lives on GitHub. It targets small FPGAs, drops resource use from about 12k LUTs to 6k LUTs, and runs real software: MicroPython upstreamed, Zephyr and Rust ports working, basic JTAG debug and CI in place. The CPU is simple in‑order RISC, and synthesis with open tools is next.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Start
- 1:16Open Source Firmware
- 1:48Raptor POWER9 Workstation
- 3:26Microwatt
- 4:30Language support
- 6:27Recent Developments
- 10:18Any Bugs?
- 12:13What we got right
- 12:43What we got wrong
- 13:39Next Steps
- 14:24Come join us!








