Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Complex CPU Addressing modes, for free!

One of the most powerful features of a central processing units is the ability to access memory using complex indexing modes. These modes are essential to implement compound data structures such as arrays, structures and classes in an efficient manner. Our FPGA soft-processor core will need to do all these things too.
 
The instruction set architecture (ISA) that we have developed in the previous post support only basic register indirection, like this:

MOV [R1], R2
MOV R1,[R2]

where the [R1] denotes the memory address pointed to by the register R1.

However, as we shall see, we can support rather complex indexing modes essentially for free!
 
Recall the layout of our execution unit: