Automated Pipeline Design

The interlock and forwarding logic is considered the tricky part of a fully-featured pipelined microprocessor and especially debugging these parts delays the hardware design process considerably. It is therefore desirable to automate the design of both interlock and forwarding logic. The hardware design engineer begins with a sequential implementation without any interlock and forwarding logic. A tool then adds the forwarding and interlock logic required for pipelining. This paper describes the algorithm for such a tool and the correctness is formally verified. We use a standard DLX RISC processor as an example. Keywords Pipeline, Forwarding, Interlock

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Daniel Kroening, Wolfgang J. Paul
• Keywords: DAC 2001, Design Automation, Fully-featured Pipelined Microprocessor, Hardware Design Engineer, Interlock Logic