Deterministic microcode machine generation

Abstract

Microcode is a technique that is used to implement internal state machine sequencing in different type of controllers addressing a large range of different applications. It can be used to reduce the functional as well as the internal complexity of a design. A challenge in using microcode based IP-design in IPs that are designed to be used in critical applications is to ensure that the microprogram (i.e. a sequence of microcode instructions) will execute correctly in a possible harsh environment. A lot of work has been published on automatic generation of microcode as well as on proving that microcode generation is correct. However, very little work has been done on ensuring that microcode executes correctly in a harsh environment. In this paper, we propose a new deterministic solution that generates for a given set of valid internal state machine sequences the microcode as well as the embedded verification mechanism that verifies on the fly that the execution of the microcode sequence is correct and that the sequence is a valid sequence.