[Oberon] Oberon OS / HAL / FPGA

[Paul Reed]

Hi Daniel,

> As a rather new user of Oberon (AOS build 9799) I am interested in
> whether there are really FPGAs on which Oberon runs? Does it have to
> do with the ETH PULP project (http://asic.ethz.ch)?

Not as far as I know.

However, the original Project Oberon system was updated in 2013 and runs 
on a variety of FPGA boards.

These boards come and go, and the effort to port the system to a new 
FPGA board is relatively high.  Currently there is no low-cost 
mass-produced board available.

The reference design is based on a Digilent Spartan 3 board, with a 
Xilinx Spartan 3 (xc3s200) and 1MB (2 x 256K x 16) external 10ns 
asynchronous static RAM.  This kind of memory is rare on FPGA boards; 
they tend to have much slower (in the random case) but bigger and more 
complex synchronous dynamic RAM.

The soft processor is a simple 32-bit RISC designed by Niklaus Wirth.  
The instruction set architecture description fits on one sheet of paper.

See http://www.projectoberon.com and Prof. Wirth's home page at 
https://inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/

HTH,
Paul