Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons^™

Smart: Small Machine For Research And Teaching, Nozar Tabrizi

Electrical & Computer Engineering Publications

We introduce SMaRT, a 16-bit single-cycle RISC-type processor with 16-bit-wide instructions. SMaRT features the novel concept of 2.5-address instructions to avoid the data loss that inherently exists in 2-address processors. Additionally, SMaRT’s short-branch instructions take advantage of the temporal locality of reference in accessing the upper or lower halves of the CPU’s 16x16 orthogonal register file. This allows SMaRT to significantly extend the range of the short-branch instructions. We show that these novelties are achieved at almost no performance cost and negligible hardware cost. SMaRT has four operation modes, namely Single-Step, to execute one instruction at a time, Manual, to …