Basic Processor Design

Abstract

In previous chapters we introduced the physical characteristics of digital circuits and the mechanisms used to design and implement them, followed by a functional description of how a computer processor executes programs. We can now combine this experience by examining how to design and implement a concrete processor. In this chapter we focus on the high-level design issues rather than the design of individual components. As such, we cover micro-architecture design (the design of the physical hardware) and instruction set design (the design of the interface to the hardware offered to the programmer). In other books, it is popular to introduce assembly language at this point as a means of programming the resulting system. We take a different approach, opting to describe instructions (and hence programs) using the pseudo-assembly language introduced previously.