The RiSC-16 Architecture
The RiSC-16 is a teaching instruction-set used by the author at the University of Maryland, and which is a blatant (but sanctioned) rip-off of the Little Computer (LC-896) developed by Peter Chen at the University of Michigan. The primary differences include the following:
RiSC stands for Ridiculously Simple Computer, which makes sense in the context in which the instruction-set is normally used -- to teach simple organization and architecture to undergraduates who do not yet know how computers work. The architecture has a whopping 8 opcodes, uses 8 registers, and is nonetheless general enough to execute fairly sophisticated programs. This makes it a relatively useful teaching tool, as it allows students to look at computer architecture concepts from simple to advanced without the instruction-set getting in the way or cluttering up the picture.
This page includes documentation on the instruction set and several different processor implementations, including sequential, pipelined, and out-of-order. Verilog for the out-of-order core is also available for download. Verilog for the other implementations is not available, because those are projects that I assign to my architecture students.
|File Name||Document Name||Document Description|
|RiSC-isa.pdf||The RiSC-16 Instruction-Set Architecture||Describes the instruction-set architecture: machine-code forms, assembly-code forms, etc.|
|RiSC-sys.pdf||RiSC-16 System Architecture||Describes the system-level component of the instruction set, including system calls, exceptions, how interrupts should be handled, etc. STILL IN DEVELOPMENT.|
|RiSC-seq.pdf||RiSC-16: Sequential Implementation||Describes a sequential implementation of the architecture: control flow, data flow, etc.|
|RiSC-pipe.pdf||The Pipelined RiSC-16||Describes a pipelined implementation of the architecture: control flow, data flow, pipeline stages, pipeline hazards, data forwarding, etc.|
|RiSC-oo.1.pdf||An Out-of-Order RiSC-16: Tomasulo + Reorder Buffer = Interruptible Out-of-Order||Describes an out-of-order implementation: instruction queue (ROB/RUU), fetch buffers, forwarding logic, wakeup/scheduling logic, recovery from branch misspeculations, memory request queue, commit logic, etc. Version 1 does not implement precise interrupts (sorry; I ran out of time). Version 2 will have TLBs with software-managed TLB-refill (a la MIPS).|
|RiSC-ex.pdf||RiSC-oo.1.v Execution Example||The document An Out-of-Order RiSC-16 gives the first dozen machine cycles in the execution of a small assembly-code file. The full execution is given in this document.|
|File Name||Description of Contents|
|a.c||C code for a rudimentary RiSC-16 assembler.|
|laplace.s||RiSC-16 assembly code for a decent-sized benchmark, written by Vince Weaver and Asher Lazarus -- former enee350 and enee759m students.|
If you do not find what you are looking for, please feel free to email me with suggestions for more/different/modified documents. Same goes for bug fixes.