Simple CPU Design

CS 441 Lecture, Dr. Lawlor

Silicon FET Transistors
Modern transistors are FET transistors: you charge up a small channel called the "gate", and it conducts current between two terminals. In an "n-channel FET", the gate already has plenty of electrons, so you need to discharge them with a positive voltage to allow it to conduct. In a "p-channel FET", you open the gate with a negative voltage. I like Wikipedia's pictures for these: n-channel is a positive logic input, and p-channel is an inverting input with an inverting circle.

You can build logic gates from FET transistors quite easily in a "totem pole" configuration. Here's an inverter:

When A is positive, it turns off the high gate, disconnecting Q from positive voltage (Vdd); and turns on the low gate, connecting Q to the negative voltage (Vss): A positive makes Q negative. When A is negative, it turns on the high gate and off the low gate, connecting Q to positive voltage and disconnecting negative voltage; A negative makes Q positive.

Here's an AND gate built from FET transistors, and the corresponding silicon implementation:

It's quite easy to build all the logic gates with FET transistors!

Circuit Simulation via TkGate

We're really not going to do spend much time designing actual digital circuits (this isn't an EE course!), but it's important to understand the general way digital logic circuits work.

The easiest way to do this is to just play around with circuits for a few hours. I've prepared the examples below using TkGate, a UNIX-ey open source digital logic designer and simulator.

In Windows, TkGate is only available via the UNIX compatability layer Cygwin, but it is built in to Cygwin.
In Linux, TkGate is often available from your package manager (in Ubuntu, "sudo apt-get install tkgate; sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ /usr/share/tkgate-1.8.7/libexec").
In MacOS X, supposedly TkGate can be built from source, which you download here.

The TkGate Documentation is pretty good, and the program runs a simple tutorial when you start it.

Many other circuit simulators exist. In EE 341, I used "LogicWorks", which is a fine commercial program for Windows and MacOS. Sadly, translating circuits between two graphical simulator packages is only rarely possible!

Simple CPUs built from Digital Logic Circuits

Here are a few steps on the evolutionary path to a CPU:

First, an add circuit. We've set up two 8-bit hex input devices (DIP Switches) in TkGate, hooked them to a Make -> ALU -> Adder, and displayed both input and output binary data in 8-LED arrays. Click the above circuit to download the TkGate Verilog-style circuit description.

Here's almost the same circuit, except now we run the input values past a multiply circuit as well as the adder.

Now we've added a "bus". The little three-input triangles below each arithmetic unit are "tri-state buffer/drivers", which enable us to turn the add and multiply outputs on and off, and so combine the outputs of these two circuits. The idea is we turn on the output we want, which at the moment we do manually, by flipping the appropriate output switch. If you turn multiple outputs on at the same time, or turn no outputs on, TkGate shows a yellow indeterminate output state. In real circuits, driving a bus to several different values causes the buffer drivers to heat up and possibly fry themselves!

Now we add a set of "registers", which are just data storage elements. We hook up the output of each register to a tri-state driver, and use the drivers to select which register we want to read as input. We hook up the data input to each register to the arithmetic output bus. Finally, we can manually "clock in" the arithmetic result into any register (via the triangle-shaped register inputs).

Annoyingly, TkGate starts all the registers in indeterminate (yellow) state, rather than zero, so we have to manually clear the registers at simulated startup by flipping the register clear switch off and then on again.

OK, now we're approaching a real CPU! The only thing we're missing is a control unit that will flip all the switches appropriately to execute some instructions!

The big trapezoidal "0 D 3" modules are called decoders (also known as demultiplexors or demuxes). They take a binary input value (the red bus going in the top), and copy the left input to one of the four outputs along the bottom. We've wired these mux outputs to the input lines of our arithmetic bus, register output bus, and register input bus. This means that rather than manually flipping switches, we just need to load a binary number into the "instruction" register!

In this case, we've connected bits 1:0 (the low two bits) of the instruction to the arithmetic operation demux. So if the low bits are 00, the add circuit turns on. If the low bits are 01, the multiply circuit turns on. Bits 5:4 (the low two bits of the high hex digit) connect to the register output. So 00 means output register 0 to the arithmetic input bus, 01 means output register 1, 10 means output register 2, and 11 is an error. Finally, bits 7:6, the high two bits of the instruction, connect to the register input control lines. To write to register 0, the high bits should be zero, and so on. You need to manually flip the "write" switch to make the registers write (this avoids annoying circuit race conditions).

So overall, this CPU's instructions look like:
<destination register: 2 bits> <source register: 2 bits> <unused: 2 bits> <operation: 2 bits>
<constant: 8 bits>
For example, the instruction (hex) "40" (binary 0100 0000) writes to register 1, reads from register 0, and adds.