Frix: Feasible and Reconfigurable IBM PC Compatible SoC

In order to develop high performance computer systems effectively, environments to evaluate architectural ideas are required.In these purpose, software based simulators are often used, but they have disadvantage of slow simulation speed.In order to achieve fast simulation speed, hardware environments are desired. We propose Frix (Feasible and Reconfigurable IBM PC Compatible SoC), which is an FPGA-based evaluation environment with an x86 soft processor.Frix can boot general purpose operating systems, FreeDOS and TinyCore.The source code of Frix is written in Verilog HDL, and released as open-source.In this paper, we detail the design of Frix and show how to use Frix for research and education.