The Designer's Guide to VHDL, 2nd Edition

15 Case Study: The DLX Computer System

In this, our third case study, we develop a series of models of the DLX CPU, originally described by Hennessy and Patterson[7]. We first develop a behavioral model and test it using a test benchn consisting of a memory and some instrumentation. Next, we refine the model to the register transfer level. We test this version in a test bench that compares its outputs with those of behavioral version.

15.1 Overview of the DLX CPU

The DLX CPU was originally designed by Hennessy and Patterson [7] as a vehicle for teaching principles of computer architecture. It is a simple reduced instruction set computer (RISC), very similar to many of the first generation of commercially available RISC CPUs. The designers ...