On the formal pescription of microoperations and its impact on automatic microcode generation

Abstract

Automatic microcode generation is a significant research field of firmware engineering. In the research System AMPS, three kinds of formal description of microoperations will be needed in automatic microcode generation from high level microprogramming language: algorithmic microoperations, real microoperations, and formal microoperations. In this paper, we present and discuss the formal descriptions, the relationship among real microoperations as well as the factors by which the concurrency of microoperations can be identified; we also show the vitality of these three kinds of description mentioned above in allowing the high level microprogramming language being machine-independent, and the generality of microcode compaction algorithm.