Computer Architecture Project - worseVax

By Ray Healy and Ian Campbell

Description

Our project strove to create only the worst knockoff immitation of a subset of what VAX could do. More seriously, we chose to develop a microcoded CPU with complex instruction encodings, numerous addressing modes, the ability to accept variable numbers of operands for a given instruction, and some complex commands.

To this end we support 13 different instruction modes (including regular suspects like registers, immediates, and displacement, as well as stranger ones like memory indirect and scaled operands), and many instructions, most of which accept varying numbers of operands of most types, performing extra interpretation as needed to fill out their operand lists.

Basic Usage

• After installing the repo, run make in directory src to generate the simulator
• Usage: CPU <obj file> [microTrace on y/n] [alternate microcode file]
  • The object file is the only requirement, and is the program to run
  • The 2nd arg will turn on micro trace output if its first character is 'y'
  • The 3rd arg specifes an alternative file to load microcode from
    • The default value of this arg is uCode.obj relative to the execution location

Included Files

• src: Main source code directory

  • CPU.h: the main entrypoint for the simulation
  • cpu.h/cpu.cpp: define the actual simulation (hardware, linking, and controls)
  • includes.h: General includes file, ensures that all files get everything they need to function
  • testFiles/*: get their own section

• Asm: Assembler code

  • Assembler/*: All code for the macro-code assembler
  • uAsm/*: All code for the micro-code assembler and linker

• HW_Docs

  • The files already submitted earlier describing our hardware

• ISA_Docs: The documents comprising our ISA

  • ISA_doc.txt: Our compiled ISA document

• uCode: all information pertaining to our micro code

  • asm/*: The assembly and object files implementing the microcode
  • rtl/*: The RTL files originally used to describe the code
  • uCodeFmt.txt: Defines the microcode format

Included Tests

• 9thfib.obj: An object file which recursively calculates the 9th fibbonacci number
• 10thfib.obj: An object file which recursively calculates the 10th fibbonacci number
• alu_tests.obj: Basic tests on most of the ALU functions
• argTypeTest.obj: Basic tests for most of the addressing modes
• testBGE.obj: Tests the performance of BGE (created to debug)
• branchTest.obj: Tests the ALU flag conditionals
• copyTest.obj: Demo of both CPY and of operand interpretation

Additional Notes

• Although OUT was implemented, the simulated device attached never was, so its entire function is to write to a register that is never utilized.