Providing a laboratory for instruction set design
Abstract
Computer architecture classes do not provide students with laboratory experience in the design of instruction set architectures. Projects that compare designs have not been possible due to a lack of support software. The design and evaluation of a new instruction set requires an assembler, a symbolic debugger, and a statistics gatherer. Every new instruction set requires changes to all three programs. It would be unrealistic to expect that either students or instructor would (re)write such software in order to evaluate each new design.
A new, flexible software package called the Instruction Set Testbed (IST) provides for the comparison of instruction set architectures without writing any of the support software. IST's table-driven assembler uses a student-supplied architecture definition to assemble programs. IST's interactive debugger and a statistics gatherer also have access to the architecture definition. This allows symbolic debugging of the assembly language programs and automatic histogramming of instruction usage in the student-defined architecture.
IST has been used in both undergraduate and graduate architecture classes to investigate such topics as orthogonality, choice and number of operands, addressing modes, and RISC philosophy.
References
[1]
Carlson, David. Simulatated Microprogramming in the Classroom. SIGCSE Bulletin 19 (4):60--63, December 1987.
[2]
Donaldson, John. MicMac: A Microprogram Simulator for Courses in Computer Organization. Eighteenth SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education February, 1987, pp. 428-431.
[3]
Dunworth, Alan and Viriya Upatising. UMAC: A Simulated Microprogrammable Teaching Aid. SIGCSE Bulletin 21 (3):39-43, September 1989.
[4]
Harris, J. Archer. A Microprogramming Project for a Course in Computer Systems. SIGCSE Bulletin 20 (2):43-49, June 1988.
[5]
Moore, Freeman. Teaching Microcode Principles. Fourteenth SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Educa~lion February, 1983, pp. 112-115.
[6]
Parker, J. R., and K. Becket. A Microprogramming Simulator for instructional Use. Fifteenth SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education February, 1984, pp. 69-75.
[7]
Sanchez, Eduardo. A Microprograraming Teaching Environment Using the Macintosh Computer. Sigmicro Newsletter 20 (3):148- 155, August 1989.
[8]
Sayers, Jerry, and David Martin. A Hypothetical Computer to Simulate Microprogramming and Conventional Machine Language. SIGCSE Bulletin 20 (4):43-49, December 1988.
[9]
Tanenbaum, Andrew. Structured Computer Organization. Prentice Hall, 1990.
[10]
Yen, Ruey-Fong and Yongmin Kim. Development and Implementation of an Educational Simulator Software Package for a Specific Microprogramming Architecture. IEEE Transactions on Software E-29 (1):1-11, February 1986.
Index Terms
- Providing a laboratory for instruction set design
Recommendations
Providing a laboratory for instruction set design
SIGCSE '92: Proceedings of the twenty-third SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science educationComputer architecture classes do not provide students with laboratory experience in the design of instruction set architectures. Projects that compare designs have not been possible due to a lack of support software. The design and evaluation of a new ...
Automatic custom instruction identification for application-specific instruction set processors
The application-specific instruction set processors (ASIPs) have received more and more attention in recent years. ASIPs make trade-offs between flexibility and performance by extending the base instruction set of a general-purpose processor with custom ...
Increasing the instruction fetch rate via block-structured instruction set architectures
MICRO 29: Proceedings of the 29th annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on MicroarchitectureTo exploit larger amounts of instruction level parallelism, processors are being built with wider issue widths and larger numbers of functional units. Instruction fetch rate must also be increased in order to effectively exploit the performance ...
Comments
Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
Copyright © 1992 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 01 March 1992
Published in SIGCSE Volume 24, Issue 1
Check for updates
Qualifiers
- Article
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 212Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)50
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)22
Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in