Building a CPU - The beginning

So I got the brilliant idea to build a CPU from scratch. So, I'm well into the design phase of this project now, and have a pretty good start. I've designed the ALU, and have some of the control circuitry done.

The diagram above shows the ALU circuitry. Bus A and Bus B serve as the inputs. The shifter can only accept input from bus a, the complementor can accept inputs from either bus. All feed into the result bus, additionally the complementor can feed into the second argument of the adder.

The ALU is capable of performing logic functions (AND, OR, XOR) complementation (NOT, and two's complement) shifting, rotating and addition. Other operations will need to be composites of existing operations. The shifter can shift, rotate, shift with a carry in, and rotate through carry. The flags unit determines which of the 4 flag bits should be active. Results will be placed on the results bus.

Multiplication and division are not available in the ALU, but could be emulated in software using shifts and addition. The ALU also works on signed values, and the shifter can be set to sign extend or not. With signed values subtraction becomes simple addition.


Below is the control circuit. This is not complete as of yet, but may give some insight into how it all works together.

You'll notice it all looks overwhelmingly complex. It isn't really. There are a ton of control lines to direct the ALU what to do, control the registers, and control where the data goes. Unfortunately, the simulation software doesn't allow for sub circuits to have pins that serve as both an input and an output, so there are double the lines on the circuit. You can see that the address bus is 16 bits wide, and the data bus is 4 bits wide.

The CPU has the following registers: Four Bit: A (Accumulator), O (Operand) FLAGS, C (Counter), 16 bit: PC (Program Counter), SI, DI (source and destination addresses). Additionally, there are two registers for the stack. These combine on the data bus to form a 16 bit address, SP and BP. BP is four bits wide, SP is 12 bits wide. This allows for 4k of stack. The placement of the stack is restricted to 4k boundaries, but the BP register allows some flexibility in the placement of the stack, depending on how external memory is configured. The control word will come from a microcode sequencer.

Some of this design is likely to change, and there are some mistakes. the ALU should only be wired to accept input from the accumulator and another register, and will output to a temporary holding latch, which will then store the value in the register. This means the basic operations can complete in two clock cycles. As the diagram is now, it does not function. The data bus controller can only direct data from once source to one destination, and both of the ALU busses are connected to this controller.