Select-and-insert instruction within data processing systems

Abstract

A data processing systemis provided including an instruction decoderresponsive to program instructions within an instruction registerto generate control signals for controlling data processing circuitry. The instructions supported include an address calculation instruction which splits an input address value at a position dependent upon a size value into a first portion and second portion, adds a non-zero offset value to the first portion, sets the second portion to a value and then concatenates the result of the processing on the first portion and the second portion to form the output address value. Another type of instruction supported is a select-and-insert instruction. This instruction takes a first input value and shifts it by N bit positions to form a shifted value, selects N bits from within a second input value in dependence upon the first input value and then concatenates the shifted value with the N bits to form an output value. The address calculation instruction and the select-and-insert instruction described above are useful when manipulating two-dimensional data arrays, and particularly so when these are two-dimensional data arrays are formed of Viterbi trellis data through which traceback operations are to be performed.