23Sep 2017 by kamkin No Comments

MicroTESK @ NGC 2017

Conferences
MicroTESK was presented at the Digital Design and Computer Architecture workshop, a part of the Nano and Giga Challenges in Electronics (NGC) conference held in Tomsk, Russia on September 18-22, 2017. It was a Russian-speaking forum divided into two tracks: a student school and a meeting on digital design education. Alexander Kamkin made a presentation at the second track. We think that MicroTESK is a good option for teaching computer design and verification. Here are some reasons for that. Test program generators (TPGs) are essential verification tools. MicroTESK is an open-source TPG, while other similar tools are closed. MicroTESK includes a set of pre-defined ISA specifications, e.g., MIPS. MicroTESK is being used in real-life CPU design projects.
Read More
03Sep 2017 by kamkin No Comments

Templates and Revisions in MicroTESK

New Features
The recent MicroTESK build (2.4.34) supports two nML extensions that ease developing and maintaining ISA specifications: templates and revisions. Templates allow defining families of operations whose operands differ only in their data types. To describe an operation in a generic way, the following constructs have been introduced: type_of, size_of, and is_type. Here is an example. op cmd_B(op1: BYTE, ...) ... op cmd_D(op1: DWORD, ...) action = { ... } Revisions allows enabling/disabling ISA elements (registers, operations, etc.) depending on the current ISA version. In the example below, the cmd_v2 operation is enabled only when the CPU_V2 revision is turned on. @rev(CPU_V2) op cmd_v2(rd: REG, rn: REG) To define different versions of the same ISA element, the @rev construct can be applied to the element attributes (syntax, action, etc.). Here comes an example.…
Read More