README.md

Saruwatari: a four stage, superscalar processor

Description

Saruwatari is a simplified, four-staged, superscalar, general purpose processor, designed as the final project for the course of Hardware Design at the University of Catania.

Architecturally, it is similar to the DLX, except that it has two datapaths and it has only four stages instead of five (the execution and the memory have been condensed).

Instruction set

For the complete instruction set, see https://raw.github.com/kid-a/Saruwatari/master/instruction_set/is.dat

Schematic

See https://github.com/kid-a/Saruwatari/raw/master/schematic/schematic_complete.png

Hazards

As in every pipeline, there hazards can occur. We have been given the following assumptions:

• only datapath 1 can perform memory operations
• given a couple of successive instructions, only one can be a memory operation
• the execute stage for instructions lw, sw, mult, multi, div requires two clock cycles
• no data dependency between couple of instructions executed concurrently

We have also been requested to handle hazards in the following way:

• structural hazards: stall
• data hazards: stall
• control hazards: predict untaken with branch outcome known during decode

In order to detect and handle hazards, saruwatari has an hazard control unit, whose input/output signals mapping can be found in https://github.com/kid-a/Saruwatari/raw/master/doc/control_unit_signals.ods

A more detailed description of how saruwatari handles hazards can be found in https://raw.github.com/kid-a/Saruwatari/master/doc/hazards.txt

Dependencies

In order to simulate saruwatari, you need:

• ghdl, for the vhdl description (http://ghdl.free.fr/)
• gcc, for the SystemC description
• SystemC (http://www.systemc.org/home/)
• a waveform visualizer (such as http://gtkwave.sourceforge.net/)

Authors

• Daniele Marletta
• Loris Fichera

License

saruwatari is free software, as it is released under the GPL ver 2.1.