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Issues of the design of a low level microprogramming language for global microcode compaction

Published:01 December 1981Publication History
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Abstract

Microcode compaction, or packing, is the process of assigning microoperations to microwords so that the minimum number of microwords and execution time is used by the microprogram. The techniques for global microcode compaction have been described elsewhere (see below). This paper describes a proposal for an intermediate level language approach to compilation which allows machine independent global compaction. We will call the program which does this compaction the packer. This work comes from the development of the V-Compiler, a retargetable microprogram generation system1. The goal is to be able to produce very high quality microcode, while allowing code manipulations to be described and performed in an orderly manner.

References

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM SIGMICRO Newsletter
        ACM SIGMICRO Newsletter  Volume 12, Issue 4
        Dec. 1981
        187 pages
        ISSN:1050-916X
        DOI:10.1145/1014192
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        • cover image ACM Conferences
          MICRO 14: Proceedings of the 14th annual workshop on Microprogramming
          December 1981
          214 pages

        Copyright © 1981 Authors

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

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        • Published: 1 December 1981

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