The microprocessor phenomenon

Rethinking the Microprocessor

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are tiny regulators of gene expression that are processed from longer primary transcripts. In this issue, Han et al. (2006) report some of the structural features of the primary transcript that ensure that the Drosha-DGCR8 enzyme complex liberates precisely the correct precursor sequence, enabling production of a fully functional miRNA.

Prototyping the DLX microprocessor

We describe our prototyping of a functioning DLX microprocessor, based on the 32-bit instruction set architecture developed by Patterson and Hennessy. This architecture is an emerging academic standard, but to our knowledge has yet to be successfully prototyped. Our implementation of DLX is a 12" x 15" 2layer circuit board, containing 59 chips and running on a 2 MHz clock. Our machine was devel...

Microprocessor standards

Now that microprocessors have been with us for three or four years, we can stand back and observe some disadvantages of our free enterprise system, as well as obviously great advantages. The disadvantages tend to fall most heavily on the shoulders of the user, not the manufacturer. The proliferation of microprocessors with incompatible instruction sets, adds unnecessary chores to learning new m...

Introducing the FR500 Embedded Microprocessor

0272-1732/00/$10.00  2000 IEEE Because conventional RISC processors have insufficient processing power to support the continuing development of digital consumer products, we need a new highperformance processor for multimedia applications. Processing multimedia video images requires more than 10 times the currently available performance. At Fujitsu, we provide this higher performance in softwa...

Microprocessor Systems