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CPU design is the design engineering task of producing a CPU, a component of computer hardware. It is a subfield of electronics engineering and computer engineering. more...

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Overview

CPU design focuses on these areas:

datapaths (such as ALUs and pipelines); control unit: logic which controls the datapaths; Memory components such as register files, caches; Clock circuitry such as clock drivers, PLLs, clock distribution networks; Pad transceiver circuitry; Logic gate cell library which is used to implement the logic;

CPUs designed for high performance markets might require custom designs for each of these items to achieve frequency, power-dissipation, and chip-area goals.

CPUs designed for lower performance markets might lessen the implementation burden by:

acquiring some of these items by purchasing them as intellectual property; use control logic implementation techniques (logic synthesis using CAD tools) to implement the other components - datapaths, register files, clocks;

Common logic styles used in CPU design include:

unstructured random logic; finite state machines; microprogramming (common from 1965 to 1985, no longer common except for CISC CPUs); programmable logic array (common in the 1980s, no longer common);

Device types used to implement the logic include:

Transistor-transistor logic Small Scale Integration jelly-bean logic chips - no longer used for CPUs; Programmable Array Logic and Programmable logic devices - no longer used for CPUs; Emitter Coupled Logic gate arrays - no longer common; CMOS gate arrays - no longer used for CPUs; CMOS ASICs - what's commonly used today, they're so common that the term ASIC is not used for CPUs; Field Programmable Gate Arrays - common for soft microprocessors, and more or less required for reconfigurable computing;

A CPU design project generally has these major tasks:

programmer-visible instruction set architecture, which can be implemented by a variety of microarchitectures; architectural study and performance modeling; RTL (eg. logic) design and verification; circuit design of speed critical components (caches, registers, ALUs); logic synthesis or logic-gate-level design; timing analysis to confirm that all logic and circuits will run at the specified operating frequency; physical design including floorplanning, place and route of logic gates; checking that RTL, gate-level, transistor-level and physical-level representatations are equivalent; checks for signal integrity, chip manufacturability;

As with most complex electronic designs, the logic verification effort (proving that the design does not have bugs) now dominates the project schedule of a CPU.

Key CPU architectural innovations include cache, virtual memory, instruction pipelining, superscalar, CISC, RISC, virtual machine, emulators, microprogram, and stack.

Read more at Wikipedia.org