A higher level language for micro-programming

摘要

There are many reasons why microprogramming has become an essential architectural attribute in contemporary computers. It provides certain well-known design and manufacturing advantages. It also facilitates the emulation of other machine languages. It gives the user the opportunity to tailor instruction sets to suit his application environment. However, a number of difficulties arise when the user attempts to exploit the potential of microprogramming. When microprograms are stored in Read-Only Memories (ROM's), the advantage of dynamic modification of control information is lost at the microprogram level. Recent trends towards writable stores will obviate this disadvantage. Also, microinstruction coding (microcoding) of computers using horizontal or minimally encoded formats becomes a time consuming proposition.

In the foregoing sections we shall briefly review some high level languages for microcoding and develop a new language that provides an efficient way for detecting and locating parallel processable independent actions for possible representation in microinstruction.