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