Microprocessors Applied To Minicomputers
G.S. Mersten · 2005
A one card bit slice microprocessor based CPU emulation of an existing family of high speed, general purpose, aerospace processors is presented. This high performance bit slice microprocessor based machine provides the high speed computational capability necessary to satisfy a broad spectrum of real time system applications. Specific existing applications for this machine include use as the guidance and control computer for an advanced missile system, as the processing element in a fault tolerant network and as an embedded processor. The objectives of this emulation is to improve overall performance characteristics while maintaining software compatibility with the emulated family of processors. In addition, the resulting bit slice microprocessor should be upwards software compatible with its predecessors (having a powerful expanded instruction set with improved performance). The design objectives were aimed at a real time high performance processor architecture. Hardware which implements this emulation has been built and tested, verifying the desired improvements. The resulting machine is completely software compatible with its predecessors, and also contains a powerful expanded instruction set. As an example of the performance improvement achieved, the interregister add execution time is less than 250 nanoseconds, as compared with one microsecond for the predecessor machines. An overall improvement in throughput greater than three-to- one has been demonstrated for this processor (specifically, the throughput exceeds 1 MIPS*) without considering the additional efficiency obtainable through the use of the expanded instruction set. Additional design goals and improvements which have been obtained include: (a) half the weight, size and power dissipation, (b) reduced cost, (c) increased