A Family of Energy Efficient Processors

Hana ( 花 Flower in Japanese) is a soft core processor targeting small memory, low power, and small devices.

Hana 1 is a  soft core Mecrisp-Ice Forth processor built on the $35 Pico-Ice using the Lattice UltraPlus ICE40UP5K.  Applications built with this technology require 60% less memory than applications built on register machines such as the RISC-V,  Since off-chip memory access requires more than 100 times as much power as on-chip memory access, this can lead to dramatic power savings.  You can download the Hana-1 simulator for Mac OS and Linux from github.  You can also read the extensive documentation.

Work is continuing to shrink the Hana-1 processor.  It is expected to soon be half the size of the small RISC-V processors, so that it should be possible to fit four of them on a ring network on the Lattice UP5K FPGAs.