The abundance of Free Software tools, along with the availability of powerful, low-cost FPGA hardware makes this an exciting time for people interested in experimenting with microprocessor architectures. This presentation will serve as a gentle introduction to the EDA toolchain required to design and implement novel processors in programmable hardware, using the moxie processor as our example.

The moxie processor is a Free Software processor architecture, suitable for embedded in FPGA-based designs. We will discuss the origins of the moxie processor, how to port the GNU toolchain to new architectures, and the state of Free Software EDA tools required to implement soft-cores in programmable devices.