National Semiconductor Corporation

Alexander Perez

Robert James Divivier

Mario D Nemirovsky

Michael John Shay

William V Miller

Thomas W Thomson

Ralph W Haines

Daniel Ross Herrington

Kent Bruce Waterson

Narendra Sankar

Jianhua Helen Pang

James Andrew Colgan

David Scott Weinman

Ralph Warren Haines

Brian J Marley

HonKai John Tam

Stephen C Pries

Dan Craig O'Neill

John R Gunther

An integrated circuit (IC) includes multiple circuits and functions which share multiple internal signal buses, three physical and five logical, according to distributed bus access and control arbitration. The multiple internal signal buses are shared among three tiers of internal circuit functions: a central processing unit and a DMA controller; a DRAM controller and a bus interface unit; and peripheral interface circuits, such as PCMCIA and display controllers. Two of the physical buses correspond to two of the logical buses and are used for communications within the IC. The third physical bus corresponds to three of the logical buses and is used for communications between the IC and circuits external to the IC. Arbitration for accessing and controlling the various signal buses is distributed both within and among the three tiers of internal circuit functions. Maximum performance is thereby achieved from the circuit functions accessed most frequently, while still achieving high performance from those circuit functions accessed less frequently. The IC may provided with a processor core with features that support In-Circuit Emulation (ICE).

Integrated circuit with multiple functions sharing multiple internal

An apparatus and method for efficiently generating the consecutive addresses needed to access misaligned or doubleword length data stored in the memory of a general purpose microprocessor. The apparatus shares the address generation operations between a small 3 bit adder, typically contained in the bus unit, and the execution unit. Control logic is used to determine whether a data misalignment situation exists based on the length of the data which is to be retrieved and the starting address of the data. When misalignment is indicated, the control unit acts to assign the address calculations to either the 3 bit adder alone or the execution unit together with the 3 bit adder depending upon how much the present address must be incremented to obtain the new addresses.

Apparatus and method for efficiently determining addresses for

Memory requests are pipelined to an external memory by forming a memory address during the same clock cycle that the associated instruction is executed, issuing a ready signal during the clock cycle that precedes the clock cycle in which information is output from an external memory, and directing information received from the external memory to a register file during the same clock cycle that the information is received. In addition, when an instruction requires the information that was requested by the previous instruction, the information is directed to an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) during the same clock cycle that the information is received. As a result, the cycle time required to retrieve information stored in a DRAM can be substantially reduced.

Pipelined microprocessor that pipelines memory requests to an external

A microprocessor execution unit includes an arithmetic unit and an addressing unit. The arithmetic unit performs arithmetic and logical operations on operands. The addressing unit operates in conjunction with the arithmetic unit to calculate offsets, limits, and linear addresses in a single cycle.

Execution unit architecture to support X86 instruction set and X86

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Alexander Perez