Report on the 19th annual workshop on microprogramming

Abstract

Nick began his talk by discussing four 'cultures' of microprogramming; he characterized them in terms of the number of implementations expected at each of the microarchitecture, macroarchitecture and applications levels. He continued by examining the impact of VLSI on microprogramming, contending that a significant impact is the speeding up of memory access time relative to CPU cycle time; this ratio, which was once about 10:1, is now about 2:1. With the number of components on a single chip increasing, he suggested that tools for building 'module m i c r o s ' modules that fit on a single chip--is a promising direction to pursue.