Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) CMOS offers a 20–35% performance gain over bulk CMOS. High-performance microprocessors using SOI CMOS have been commercially available since 1998. As the technology moves to the 0.13m generation, SOI is being used by more companies, and its application is spreading to lower-end microprocessors and SRAMs. In this paper, after giving a short history of SOI in IBM, we de...

The level of integration has been rapidly increasing with advances in semiconductor technology. Many HP design groups have capitalized on this capability to create highly integrated ASICs, or superchips. Superchips that integrate conventional ASIC logic, microprocessors, embedded RAM and ROM, and other megacell functions save cost, power, board space, and inventory overhead and increase I/O per...

Processors, from their inception, have been designed to heavily share a limited quantity of active hardware. This trend has continued to present, with modern microprocessors heavily multiplexing small execution engines making room to hold a large number of instructions and data on chip. As we look to the future, the real-estate available on a single VLSI IC continues to increase, shifting the p...

This paper examines the radiated RF emissions from a family of microprocessors expanding on our previous investigations into this area [l]. The procedure used was SAE J1752-3 [2], which specifies a radiated emissions measurement system using a 1 GHz TBM cell with the IC under test on a standardized test board that is a part of the wall above the septum of the TEM cell. This procedure provides a...

This article presents an in-circuit emulation (ICE) module that can be embedded with a microprocessr core. The ICE module, based on the IEEE 1149.1 JTAG architecture, supports typical debugging and testing mechanisms, including boundary scan paths, partial scan paths, single stepping, internal resource monitoring and modification, breakpoint detection, and mode switching between debugging and n...

The number and variety of products that include some form of digital signal processing has grown dramatically over the last five years. DSP has become a key component in many consumer, communications, medical, and industrial products. These products use a variety of hardware approaches to implement DSP, ranging from the use of off-the-shelf microprocessors to field-programmable gate arrays (FPG...

This report shows the advantages of instruction set extensions that can added to current generation microprocessors to accelerate the implementation of wireless communication algorithms. Algorithms proposed for implementation for future wireless communications need extremely sophisticated, highcomplexity algorithms in order to provide support for services such as extremely high data rates (in M...

The parallel operation of voltage regulator modules (VRMs) for high-end microprocessors requires a current-sharing (CS) circuit to provide a uniform load distribution among the modules. A good dynamic performance of the CS circuit is very important since the microprocessors present highly dynamic loads to the VRMs. Stability and dynamic performance of the CS control are considered. To assess th...

The Advanced Encryption Standard selection process has, for the first time, included software execution speed as a relevant criterion for the choice of the next standard. The initial submissions included keying, encryption, and decryption execution times, in clock cycles, for Intel Pentium, Pentium II, and Pentium Pro microprocessors. While Pentium execution speeds are important, by no means do...

Energy per Instruction (EPI) is a measure of the amount of energy expended by a microprocessor for each instruction that the microprocessor executes. In this paper, we present an overview of EPI, explain the factors that affect a microprocessor’s EPI, and derive a historical comparison of the trends in EPI over multiple generations of Intel microprocessors. We show that the recent Intel® Pentiu...