Abstract: A software system for facilitating the design process and minimizing the time and effort required to complete the design and fabrication of an integrated circuits (IC) is described. The software system utilizes a data center having a plurality of repositories, rules engines and design and verification tools to automatically produce a hardened GDSII description or other representation of the device in response to the formation of a electronic license agreement. Designers select contractual terms for incorporating third party intellectual property and then design and initiate manufacture of the IC by way of a network portal.

Abstract: A system and methods that facilitate the design process and minimize the time and effort required to complete the design and fabrication of an integrated circuits (IC) are described. The system and method utilize a plurality of repositories, rules engines and design and verification tools to analyze the workload and automatically produce a hardened GDSII description or other representation of the device. The system and method securely maintains synthesizable RTL on a server in a data center while providing designers access to portions of the mechanism by way of a network portal.

Abstract: The present invention provides one or more synthesized assertions in a self-correcting processor, and applications thereof. In an embodiment, a synthesized assertion detects a mismatch between actual processor behavior and specified or expected processor behavior. When unexpected processor behavior is encountered, the synthesized assertion alters operation of the processor and causes the processor to behave in the specified or expected manner. Synthesized assertions in accordance with the present invention can detect and correct, for example, exception processing errors, instruction address errors, instruction opcode errors, and errors that can cause a processor to stall, as well as various other types of errors.

Abstract: The present invention provides software programmable hardware state machines to detect a cause of an error in a processor and prevent the error from occurring. In example embodiments, processors, systems and methods are provided to prevent an unwanted change in architectural state from occurring as a result of execution of a specific sequence of instruction types. A processor core is provided that includes an execution unit, a programmable mask register and a buffer that stores values representing instructions dispatched to the execution unit. The processor core also includes control logic to determine whether there is a match between a sequence in the mask register and a sequence in the buffer and, upon detecting a match, to generate control signals to perform a desired action. The desired action prevents an unwanted change from occurring to the architectural state of the processor.

Abstract: A three-tiered TLB architecture in a multithreading processor that concurrently executes multiple instruction threads is provided. A macro-TLB caches address translation information for memory pages for all the threads. A micro-TLB caches the translation information for a subset of the memory pages cached in the macro-TLB. A respective nano-TLB for each of the threads caches translation information only for the respective thread. The nano-TLBs also include replacement information to indicate which entries in the nano-TLB/micro-TLB hold recently used translation information for the respective thread. Based on the replacement information, recently used information is copied to the nano-TLB if evicted from the micro-TLB.

Abstract: A fetch director in a multithreaded microprocessor that concurrently executes instructions of N threads is disclosed. The N threads request to fetch instructions from an instruction cache. In a given selection cycle, some of the threads may not be requesting to fetch instructions. The fetch director includes a circuit for selecting one of threads in a round-robin fashion to provide its fetch address to the instruction cache. The circuit 1-bit left rotatively increments a first addend by a second addend to generate a sum that is ANDed with the inverse of the first addend to generate a 1-hot vector indicating which of the threads is selected next. The first addend is an N-bit vector where each bit is false if the corresponding thread is requesting to fetch instructions from the instruction cache. The second addend is a 1-hot vector indicating the last selected thread.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for recoding one or more instruction sets. An expand instruction and an expandable instruction are read from an instruction cache. A tag compare and way selection unit checks to verify each instruction is a desired instruction. An instruction staging unit dispatches the expand instruction to a first recoder and the expandable instruction to a second recoder of a recoding unit. At least one information bit based on the expand instruction is generated at the first recoder. The second recoder uses the at least one information bit generated at the first recoder to recode the expandable instruction, and the recoded expandable instruction is placed in an instruction buffer.

Abstract: A method, an apparatus, and a computer program product for optimising a bus in a Processor Local Bus (PLB) system are disclosed. A master engine performs a transfer transaction of N bytes of data on the bus of the PLB system. A type of read or write data transfer to be performed by the master engine is determined to optimize operation of the bus in response to a transfer request received asynchronously from a device coupled to the bus. This involves a request type determination function. Data is asynchronously transferred using a FIFO between the device and the bus dependent upon the determined type of transfer.