Design notes of microprocessor u311.1

Abstract

This handbook includes a part of the lecture notes of CENG 311 Computer Architecture course given in the undergraduate program of the Department of Computer Engineering at Izmir Institute of Technology. One aim of this course is to introduce the preliminaries of a general purpose microprocessor design. To this end, I aim to teach a very simple microprocessor which we call μ311.1 , an 16-bit processor with only 25 instructions. This document is intended to help the students with their laboratory works. In the experimental part of the course, students are expected to implement this or another similar processor using VHDL in order to attain a sufficient knowledge and intuition about “What is really happening inside a computer system?”. In other words, starting from typing printf("value:%d",*p); they must understand compiling, assembling, linking, loading the machine code and how processors execute this code. This document aims to give a very short and abstract answer to the above question. Students may find many parts missing, too short or incomplete. Nonetheless, I hope that this will be a good starting point for their deeper research as well as their study of computer architecture.