Freytag, Glenn A.

The techniques employed in integrated circuit (IC) design have advanced significantly in the past decade. Design automation tools now offer hardware description languages (HDLs) for modeling and testing new designs. Some tools can even synthesize an IC from a model written in an HDL. Such design tools promise to facilitate greatly the development of new IC designs. They also make it possible for engineering students to learn advanced techniques of IC design and computer architecture in a classroom setting. Two examples of such state-of-the-art design tools are Design Framework and Epoch. In this work, we present a hierarchical design for a reduced-instruction-set computer (RISC) processor, which we implemented using Design Framework and Epoch. The processor is based on the DLX architecture proposed by Hennessy and Patterson. We implemented our design according to a top-down methodology, which worked very well in these design tools.