Progress of the AE18 core

I've been beavering away these last few days. Taking a break from my normal work to work on some extra-normal work. The progress on the AE18 is extraordinarily well. The first time around, it took me about 2 weeks to build up a core that didn't work quite well enough. This time around, it's only been a few days, and I've managed to bring it from conception to about 80% complete.

All that I've left to do now is to implement the table read/write instructions, daw, and architectural specific issues such as write to PCL and indirect address calculation. Of course, the last bit is to perform verification by testing all the instructions at least once through software compiled using gpasm or sdcc.

As I go along, I write short unit test software to test the various features that I'm working on. At the moment, minus the specific stuff above, the software works properly. So, I'm on track to finish up the core by the end of the week (hopefully).

If this works out properly, I plan to upload it to opencores and make it available under the LGPL license. It's been about 3 years since I last updated this core. So, it's about time that I did something about it. Hand optimisation can be done at a later stage, when I need another break from my normal work. The next thing to do is to update my AEMB project and work on the new AE68 as well.