Milkymist SoC

The Milkymist One is an experimental hardware appliance for live video effects.

The small 172x145x45mm device creates visualizations similar to those generated by the MilkDrop software, and enables you to mix them with live footage from a camera and interact using MIDI and DMX controllers.

The Milkymist One is programmable and customizable at many different levels.

The simplest way one can use a Milkymist One is by affecting MIDI controls to the existing snippets of code (called "patches") that create the effects. The Milkymist One ships with dozens of pre-existing patches.

Creating new patches can be done with a simple programming language based on the MilkDrop preset format. The Milkymist One device comes with a built-in editor.

Under the hood, the Milkymist One is like a mini-computer running our Flickernoise video synthesis software.

But we did not stop at open source software. As a matter of fact, when this project started in August 2007, one of the goals was to open up chip design. Inside the device, which was launched in September 2011, the Flickernoise software is actually running on an open source CPU part of our own system-on-chip.

Milkymist SoC

The Milkymist SoC is at the core of the Milkymist One, implemented in the Spartan-6 FPGA.

The Milkymist system-on-chip uses the LatticeMico32 (LM32) core as a general purpose processor. It is a RISC 32-bit big endian CPU without a memory management unit (MMU). It is supported by the GCC compiler and can run RTEMS and uClinux. There is also an experimental back-end for LLVM targeting this microprocessor.

The LM32 microprocessor is assisted by a texture mapping unit and a programmable floating point VLIW coprocessor which are used by the Flickernoise video synthesis software. It is also surrounded by various peripheral cores to support every I/O device of the Milkymist One. The system-on-chip interconnect uses three bridged buses and mixes the Wishbone protocol with two custom protocols used for configuration registers and high performance DMA with the SDRAM.

The architecture of the Milkymist system-on-chip is largely documented in the project founder's Master thesis report. Most components of the system-on-chip, except the LatticeMico32 core, were custom developed and placed under the GNU GPL license.

The QEMU emulator can be used to run and debug Milkymist SoC binaries on another computer.

The SoC source distribution includes software libraries, the BIOS and the demonstration firmware, as well as test benches, LaTeX source for the documentation, build scripts, etc. The repository is hosted by GitHub and is available here.

Milkymist SoC is phased out in favor of the more powerful MiSoC.