The 68040 processor. I. Design and implementation

R.W. Edenfield, M.G. Gallup, William B. Ledbetter, R.C. McGarity, E.E. Quintana, R.A. Reininger · IEEE Micro · 1990

The design of the 68040, a third-generation, full-32-b microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 family, is presented. The 68040 integrates over 1.2 million transistors on one chip and can execute the complete 68020 microprocessor and 68882 floating-point coprocessor instruction sets. Pipelined integer and floating-point execution units that operate concurrently with separate internal memory controllers and an autonomous bus controller contribute to its high performance level. Physical caches of 4 kB each for instruction and data reside on chip. Separate address-translation caches of 64 entries apiece operate in parallel with the instruction and data caches. This arrangement provides complete memory management in a virtual, demand-paged operating system. The design team explains its total approach and the workings of the integer and floating-point units.>

Read the paper · More papers on PaperTik