I realized that I wanted to have a CPU running on an FPGA when teaching the course "Hardware for Embedded Systems". After contemplating an old Intel 8080, I decided to go with the ECO32 because of its more modern architecture. Furthermore, many students will already know the basic structure of the ECO32 because they wrote a code generator for it in the compiler construction course.
The "e" in ECO32e stands for "embedded". It means that the processor lacks some of the more advanced features of the original ECO32 in order to limit the amount of work to be done by the students when designing the CPU. In particular, there is no user mode and no paging. Consequently, the instructions dealing with these features are gone.
We now have a definition of ECO32e, an assembler, and a system simulator, including some ROMs with test programs. The latest version is fairly complete, so I suggest using only this one.
eco32e-0.0.tar.gz [old]
eco32e-0.1.tar.gz [old]
eco32e-0.2.tar.gz [old]
eco32e-1.0.tar.gz [old]
eco32e-1.1.tar.gz [old]
eco32e-1.2.tar.gz [old]
eco32e-1.3.tar.gz [old]
eco32e-1.4.tar.gz [stable]
If you have any further questions, don't hesitate to contact me by email to
Enjoy!
Hellwig Geisse