Year: 1979
Type: article
Abstract: A general purpose microprogram generating system has been developed to compose, together with a hardware/microprogram debugger, a general purpose development support system for LSI Processor Modules such as Am2900, MMI6700, and/or MACROLOGIC. The microprogram generator, designed to be applicable to a wide variety of microinstruction sets from vertical to horizontal including sophisticated control schemes like pipelining, has a three-level hierarchical structure. The lowest level generator is a microassembler, which has already been applied to many computers and shown its easiness of defining instructon sets and high-speed generation of object microcodes. The second level generator is an optimizing assembler, which translates a sequence of microoperations to an optimum sequence of microinstructions considering data dependency and concurrent executability of microoperations on a defined object machine. The highest level generator is the high-level microprogramming language compiler which generates an optimum sequence of microoperations utilizing techniques of optimization for high-level language compilers. Example definitions of a microinstruction set and an object machine, source programs, and object listings show the effectiveness of the hierarchical microprogram generating system.
Authors: Eiji Tamura, Mario Tokoro
Institutions: Keio University, University of Waterloo
Language: English
Subfield: Hardware and Architecture
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: Keio University
OpenAlex ID: W1995816806