Defining a Homemade CPU’s Instruction Set Architecture, Decoder, & RAM
If you happen to be designing your own CPU, you might be interested to study the work done by those before you. In this post by Colin “Domipheus” Riley topics such as ISA, Decoders, and RAM and tackled; this is part 3 in an ongoing blog series that is now nearly 1 year old.
This is a 16 bit machine, and I want to keep things simple. To that end, we use a fixed instruction length. Each instruction will always be 16 bits long, regardless of what it does. This allows our instruction decoder to be much simpler. However, fitting all the information we need into an instruction may be difficult. In the last part, I mentioned we have a register set comprising of 8 16-bit registers, meaning we need 3 bits to address one. I’ve not decided to have any of the registers special, like r0 always being zero. All are addressable.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
