HIGHLY RECONFIGURABLE SOFT-CPU BASED PERIPHERAL MODULES DESIGN

Abstract

Research motivation. When developing microcontrollers, manufacturers try to include as many different types of peripherals as possible in order to increase the marketing attractiveness of their products. On the one hand, with a large assortment of various peripheral modules, it is very difficult to implement several devices of the same type in the microcontroller: manufacturers are mainly limited to 1-2 instances, in rare cases 4 modules of the same type are included. On the other hand, most software projects do not use all the peripherals of modern microcontrollers and many devices are left unused, while there may be a shortage of other types of modules. Another problem that has become especially noticeable for microcontrollers used in the field of IoT is the cryptographic protection of data that is transmitted through built-in information exchange interfaces. The main efforts of researchers and developers of cryptographic data protection methods were aimed at reducing energy-intensive operations, memory access iterations and speeding up encryption processes while maintaining a high level of cryptographic protection and enabling efficient data distribution within IoT devices networks. Research results. This paper presents an alternative approach to the manufacture of peripheral modules as part of microcontrollers. The authors propose to use a configurable software processor module based on the MIPS architecture with a reduced instruction set and limited capabilities. Conclusions. This approach would make it possible to dynamically change the functionality of peripheral modules in accordance with the requirements of the developed software solution, which in turn will increase the efficiency of the microcontroller chips capabilities utilization. In addition, the transfer of data stream encryption functions to the reconfigurable core of the peripheral module will provide fast and transparent cryptographic protection, as well as allow offloading the microcontroller core and increasing the energy efficiency of chips while reducing their production cost.