A 30 MIPS VLSI CPU

Abstract

A description is given of a VLSI CPU which implements an existing 32-b architecture with a set of 140 instructions, most of which can be executed within one effective clock cycle. The device is fabricated in an nMOS process with three metal layers having minimum metal-1 line width of 1.5 mu m and drawn device lengths of 1.7 mu m. The die, containing 183000 transistors, is 1.4 cm*1.4 cm. The CPU directly addresses external SRAMs organized as a two-way set-associative split 512-kb-instruction/512-kb-data cache. Separate instruction and data paths allow for concurrent overlapped cache memory access. Chip specifications are presented, and the CPU data path is shown.<>