Review of "Principles of Firmware Engineering in Microprogram Control, by Michael Andrews", Computer Science Press, 1980

The contents of this book are as follows: Chapter I: Control in Digital Machines. This chapter develops the concept of the control unit and compares hardwired control units with microprograrn~ed control units. Chapter 2: Sequencing Inside the Control Unit. This chapter covers in detail various microprograrrrned control unit organizations. Chapter 3: Microinstruction Organization. This chapter covers various aspects of microinstruction design such as vertical versus horizontal formats and mona versus polyphase clock organization. Chapter 4: Minimization of RaM Width. This chapter deals with techniques to reduce the number of bits used in a given microprogram. Chapter S: Firmware Engineering. This chapter covers various techniques of microprogram optimization. Chapter 6: A Firmware Engineering Development Tool. This chapter describes a specific microprogram design technique based on algorithmic state machine concepts. Chapter 7: This chapter surveys microprograrrmable bit-slice devices and microcontroller devices. At the end of each chapter questions and references are provided. Perhaps the mast serious defect of the book is in its use of out of date computers as real life examples. For example, the IBM System 360-out of production for over ten years-is used as the focal point of several discussions. However, no mention is made of more recent IBM System 370 processors that utilize large writeable control stores to contain microprograms that implement not just the base 370 machine instruction set but also operating system functions. All things considered, the book meets the goals given by the author. The coverage of general microprograrrming techniques in chapter I through 3 is very good. This book would serve well as a text for a 23