On Aug 10, 2010, at 5:14 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
...
I don't think the UDA50 use any common microprocessor even, but is implemented with
bitslices, and logic.
Correct. The main ingredients are AMD 2901 bitslice ALUs plus a 2910 sequencer.
Apparently the designer had a bunch of flexibility how those pieces go together. The UDA
used a particularly interesting approach, where the micro-instruction would instruct the
ALU part (2901) separate from the sequencer part (2910). The assembly language had two
fields per line, one for each part.
There was a one clock delay between ALU result and branch control input. So you could
read odd statements like this (paraphrasing... I don't remember the exact syntax):
clr r0 ; bne foo
because the bne would act on the ALU output from the preceding line.
I doubt that the processor part of the UDA50 would be all that hard to implement in an
FPGA, but as you said, that isn't all that helpful if what you're after is MSCP
support in the W11 FPGA.
paul