Schematics

Schematics

Jun

6

2010

I have successfully come to an end of schematics drawing. It was a challenging task, considering I had zero experience in this matter and the final design is quite complex in terms of number of components and nets. In a hope I didn’t make many mistakes I am publishing the results today and declaring the ...
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Design

EAGLE Layout Editor

May

13

2010

I am using EAGLE to draw schematic diagrams of the CPU. The reason I chose EAGLE was simple – everyone uses it, it is free (or inexpensive under non-profit license), and has a rich component library. Also, most PCB manufacturers accept EAGLE files, and if not, there are many scripts to output gerber files. So, if ...
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General

New instructions, final test run and Fibonacci

May

2

2010

Just a quick summary of what I have been doing over the last few sessions in the project. New instructions Before I continue with hardware I decided to add a few instructions I should have added a long time ago but somehow never got to it. The instructions are shorter versions of some load/store instructions I ...
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Design - ISA · Simulation

Memory module 2

Memory module

Apr

24

2010

I have completed the design of the memory module – the last required module to announce the entire design finished. I chose a very simple design, with rudimentary paging mechanism, in a hope it will not turn out to be a significant limitation in the near future. The machine features a 22-bit physical address bus, ...
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Design · Design - memory

Faults and interrupts

Faults and interrupts

Mar

14

2010

It’s been a while since I last posted and in fact I haven’t been working on the project much recently. My job is keeping me extremely busy again. Still, I made some progress on faults and interrupts mechanism for the CPU which I never managed to document. I simulated and tested the design, so it is time to ...
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Design - control

Test suite

Jan

31

2010

A test suite to validate the microcode and my current software toolchain is now complete and has successfully passed. I wrote, assembled and simulated a set of simple test cases for each instruction I have in the instruction set to prove they all work as intended. The suite in total is several hundred lines of ...
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Design