Processor Design

When I started my compuTIng career by programming a PDP-11 computer as a freshman in the university in early 1980s, I could not have dreamed that one day I’d be able to design a processor. At that TIme, the freshmen were only allowed to use PDP. Next year I was given the permission to use the famous brand-new VAX-780 computer. Also, my new roommate at the dorm had got one of the first personal computers, a Commodore-64 which we started to explore together. Again, I could not have imagined that hundreds of TImes the processing power will be available in an everyday embedded device just a quarter of century later. Little by little I delved into the design of digital circuits, and computer architecture. I finally learned my lessons in RISC philosophy when I was teaching computer architecture classes in early 1990s according to the famous groundbreaking book by Hennessy and Patterson. At that TIme, I had already started to design processors, first some simple configurable filters and then straightforward DSP cores. The story continued in a number of different kinds of design projects purely in academia, as academiaindustry cooperation projects and as commercial developments in industry. For me, this decade has meant the time to be back in academia, where I have taught processor-design courses since 1999. A characteristic feature to these courses has been the lack of a good course textbook. I have tried out a few books, and used a scattered set of my own material trying bridge the gaps that I perceived. Year after year I got more annoyed with the absence of a textbook, until, after gaining some editor experience in another book project, I decided that the book needed to be written. I would like to thank my contact person at Springer, Mark de Jongh, who believed in me right from the start, and all the contributors of this book. A big part of the success of this project was that I knew some good people and asked for their contribution. I had worked with many of them previously in the annual International Symposium on System-on-Chip since 1999, without realizing what kind of assets they represented. Thanks also to all the people who used their valuable time to review the book chapters.I hope that you will find this book to be beneficial to you whether you are a student, engineer, teacher or engineering manager. This book definitely fills the gap that I had recognized, so I hope that we shared the same gap. In Tampere, April 2007