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The Am2900 Family consists of a series of LSI building blocks designed for use in microprogrammed computers and controllers. Each device is designed to be expandable and sufficiently flexible to be suitable for emulation of many existing machines.

Figure 1 illustrates a typical system architecture. There are two "sides" to the system. At the left is the control circuitry and on the right is the data manipulation circuitry. The block labeled "2901 array" consists of the ALU, scratchpad registers, and data steering logic (all internal to the Am2901's), plus left/right shift control and carry lookahead circuit. Data is processed by moving it from main memory (not shown) into the 2901 registers, performing the required operations on it, and returning the result to main memory. Memory addresses may also be generated in the 2901's and sent out to the memory address register (MAR). The four status bits from the 2901's ALU are captured in the status register after each operation.

The logic on the left side is the control section of the computer. This is where the Am2909 is used. The entire system is controlled by a memory, usually PROM, which contains long words called microinstructions. Each microinstruction contains bits to control each of the data manipulation elements in the system. There are, for example, 9 bits for the 2901 instruction lines, 8 bits for the A and B register addresses, 2 or 3 bits to control the shifting multiplexers at the ends of the 2901 array, and bits to control the register enables on the MAR, instruction register, and various bus transceivers. When the bits in a microinstruction are applied to all the data elements and everything is clocked, then one small operation (such as a data transfer or a register-to-register add) will occur.

Each microinstruction contains not only bits to control the data hardware, but also bits to define the location in PROM of the next microinstruction to be executed. The fields are labeled in Fig. 1 as I, CC, and BA. The I field controls the sequencer. It indicates where the next address is located-the m PC, the stack, or the direct inputs-and whether the stack is to be pushed or popped.

The CC field contains bits indicating the conditions under which the I field applies. These are compared with the condition codes in the status register and may cause modification to the I field. The comparing and modification occurs in the block labeled "control logic." Frequently this is just a PROM. The BA field is a branch address or the address of a subroutine.

The address for the microinstructions is generated by the sequencer, starting from a clock edge. The address goes from the sequencer to the ROM, and an access time later, the microinstruction is at the ROM outputs.

A pipeline register is a register placed on the output of the microprogram memory to essentially split the system in two. The pipeline register contains the microinstruction currently being executed ¬ . (Refer to the circled numbers in Fig. 1.) The data manipulation control bits go out to the system elements and a portion of the microinstruction is returned to the sequencer ­ to determine the address of the next microinstruction to be executed. That address ® is sent to the ROM, and the next microinstruction ¯ sits at the input of the pipeline register. So while the 2901's are executing one instruction, the next instruction is being fetched from ROM. Note that there is no sequential logic in the sequencer between the select lines and the output. This is important because the loop ¬ to ­ to ® to ¯ must occur during a single clock cycle. During the same time, the loop from ¬ to ° must occur in the 2901's. These two paths are roughly the same (around 200 ns worst case for a 16-bit system). The presence of the pipeline register allows the microinstruction fetch to occur in parallel with the data operation rather than serially, allowing the clock frequency to be doubled.

The emulation of an existing machine by Fig. 1 works as follows. A sequence of microinstructions in the PROM is executed to fetch an instruction from main memory. This requires that the program counter, often in a 2901 working register, be sent to the memory address register and incremented. The data returned from memory is loaded into the instruction register. The contents of the instruction register are passed through a PROM or PLA to generate the address of the first microinstruction which must be executed to perform the required function. A branch to this address occurs through the sequencer. Several microinstructions may be executed to fetch data from memory, perform ALU operations, test for overflow, and so forth. Then a branch will be made back to the instruction fetch cycle. At this point, there may be branches to other sections of microcode. For example, the machine might test for an interrupt here and obtain an interrupt service routine address from another mapping ROM rather than start on the next machine instruction.