CPU design (part 1)

The operation or task that must perform by CPU are:

• Fetch Instruction: The CPU reads an instruction from memory.


• Interpret Instruction: The instruction is decoded to determine what action is required.


• Fetch Data: The execution of an instruction may require reading data from memory or I/O module.


• Process data: The execution of an instruction may require performing some arithmatic or logical operation on data.


• Write data: The result of an execution may require writing data to memory or an I/O module.

To do these tasks, it should be clear that the CPU needs to store some data temporarily. It must remember the location of the last instruction so that it can know where to get the next instruction. It needs to store instructions and data temporarily while an instruction is beign executed. In other words, the CPU needs a small internal memory. These storage location are generally referred as registers.

The major components of the CPU are an arithmatic and logic unit (ALU) and a control unit (CU). The ALU does the actual computation or processing of data. The CU controls the movement of data and instruction into and out of the CPU and controls the operation of the ALU.

The CPU is connected to the rest of the system through system bus. Through system bus, data or information gets transferred between the CPU and the other component of the system. The system bus may have three components:

Data Bus:
Data bus is used to transfer the data between main memory and CPU.
Address Bus:
Address bus is used to access a particular memory location by putting the address of the memory location.
Control Bus:
Control bus is used to provide the different control signal generated by CPU to different part of the system. As for example, memory read is a signal generated by CPU to indicate that a memory read operation has to be performed. Through control bus this signal is transferred to memory module to indicate the required operation.

There are three basic components of CPU: register bank, ALU and Control Unit. There are several data movements between these units and for that an internal CPU bus is used. Internal CPU bus is needed to transfer data between the various registers and the ALU.

Register Organization

A computer system employs a memory hierarchy. At the highest level of hierarchy, memory is faster, smaller and more expensive. Within the CPU, there is a set of registers which can be treated as a memory in the highest level of hierarchy. The registers in the CPU can be categorized into two groups:

• User-visible registers: These enables the machine - or assembly-language programmer to minimize main memory reference by optimizing use of registers.
                             
• Control and status registers: These are used by the control unit to control the operation of the CPU. Operating system programs may also use these in privileged mode to control the execution of program.

User-visible Registers:

            The user-visible registars can be categorized as follows:

• General  Purpose  Registers
• Data  Registers
• Address  Registers
• Condition  Codes

General-purpose registers can be assigned to a variety of functions by the programmer. In some cases, general- purpose registers can be used for addressing functions (e.g., register indirect, displacement).

In other cases, there is a partial or clean separation between data registers and address registers.

Data registers may be used to hold only data and cannot be employed in the calculation of an operand address.

Address registers may be somewhat general purpose, or they may be devoted to a particular addressing mode. Examples include the following:

• Segment pointer: In a machine with segment addressing, a segment register holds the address of the base of the segment. There may be multiple registers, one for the code segment and one for the data segment.
• Index registers: These are used for indexed addressing and may be autoindexed.
• Stack pointer: If there is user visible stack addressing, then typically the stack is in memory and there is a dedicated register that points to the top of the stack.

Condition Codes (also referred to as flags) are bits set by the CPU hardware as the result of the operations. For example, an arithmatic operation may produce a positive, negative, zero or overflow result. In addition to the result itself beign stored in a register or memory, a condition code is also set. The code may be subsequently be tested as part of a condition branch operation. Condition code bits are collected into one or more registers.
                                                                                             ......... to be continued