How to build your own microprocessor? The A-SEED processor project
The A-SEED processor Perhaps one of the best ways to learn what a microprocessor is is to build one of your own. Since building a microprocessor or a processor can be an intense task, we are going to use a very simplified design that in an agile way allows us to have an experiential learning with the basic concepts. Given these premises, we present the design of the A-SEED (Another SimplEst EDucational) processor. The main characteristics of the A-SEED processor are: Pipelined architecture. Two instructions are executed simultaneously Harvard architecture, partially implemented Control Unit, Registers and ALU – reorganized in Data Unit and Control Unit. We define the registers RISC or Reduced Instruction Set Computer ISA (uniform, simple instructions, register-based). We define opcodes (an opcode is a code or portion of machine language that commands a processor to perform an operation and specify how to do it). In this simple example, we have only four types of instructions: Load, Add...