The Organization of Microprogram Stores
Subrata Dasgupta · ACM Computing Surveys · 1979
A central issue in microprogramming is the organization of the control store--the memory from which a microprogram is executed.The structure of this store has a major mfluence on the economy (in both time and memory space) of the target machine implementation, on the overall complexity of the host machine organization, and on Its microprogrammablhty.The first part of this paper surveys some aspects of control store architectures, including the organization of microinstruction words, and the effects of different timing schemes on the complexity of both control store and host machine organizations The latter part of the paper reviews some recent algorithms for optimizing the width and length of control stores.