Abstract
On many modern computers, the processor control unit is microprogrammed rather than built directly in hardware. One of the tasks of the microcode is to decode machine-level instructions: for each such instruction, it must be ensured that control-flow is directed to the appropriate microprogram for emulating it. We have investigated the use of genetic programming for evolving this instruction decode logic. Success is highly dependent on the number of opcodes in the instruction set and their relationship to the conditional branch and shift instructions offered on the microarchitecture, but experimental results are promising.
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Jackson, D. (2004). Automatic Synthesis of Instruction Decode Logic by Genetic Programming. In: Keijzer, M., O’Reilly, UM., Lucas, S., Costa, E., Soule, T. (eds) Genetic Programming. EuroGP 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3003. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24650-3_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24650-3_30
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