Software tools used in the development of a VLSI VAX Microcomputer
MICRO 17 Proceedings of the 17th annual workshop on Microprogramming
Planning a computer system: Project Stretch
Planning a computer system: Project Stretch
ATUM: a new technique for capturing address traces using microcode
ISCA '86 Proceedings of the 13th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
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Fast virtual-address translation and instruction parsing are two hard problems of implementing many modern architectures, including the VAX computer architecture. Meeting the additional constraint of fitting a VAX 11/780-computer-speed implementation into a small number of chips requires a careful coupling of microcode and chip hardware. This paper describes the chip set microarchitecture and the microcode strategies that achieve 11/780 performance. The key features are a VAX instruction prefetch unit occupying one-fourth of a custom NMOS chip, and a memory subsystem occupying another one-fourth of the chip.