3dlabs Inc., Ltd.

Ziilabs Inc. Ltd.

Jonathan Bloomfield

Nicholas J Murphy

Nicholas J N Murphy

John David Robson

Nick Murphy

John Robson

Architectures and methods for viewing data in multiple formats within a register file. Various disclosed embodiments allow a plurality of consecutive registers within one register file to appear to be temporarily transposed by one instruction, such that each transposed register contains one byte or word from multiple consecutive registers. A program can arbitrarily reorganize the bytes within a register by swapping the value stored in any byte within the register with the value stored in any other byte within the same register. Indirect register access is also provided, without additional scoreboarding hardware, as an apparent move from one register to another. The functionality of a hardware data FIFO at the I/O is also provided, without the power consumption of register-to-register transfers. However, the size of the FIFO can be changed under program control.

Flexible microprocessor register file

The write-access control line for an RTC is combined with a clear line for an RTC signature register, so that changes to the RTC will cause subsequent reads to return an invalidity flag.

Systems, methods, software, and components using tamper-proof real-time clock

An architecture for microprocessors, in which instructions include a type identifier, selects one of several interpretation registers. The interpretation registers hold information for interpreting the opcode of each instruction, so that a stream of compressed instructions (with type identifiers) can be translated into a stream of expanded instructions. Preferably the type identifiers also distinguish sequencer instructions from processing-element instructions, and can even distinguish among different types of sequencer instructions (as well as among different types of processing-element instructions).

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Lightwater, United Kingdom

Jonathan Bloomfield