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We have a few Access databases with the back end residing on the network. Users use the runtime version of Access to run the.accde on their machines linking to the back end. Applications were developed with Access 2010. Now new users are issued 64 bit Office suite including Access. Because the references call for 32 bit libraries, errors result. Warranty and liability. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, konica minolta provides to you the software “as is”; and konica minolta hereby disclaims with respect to the software all warranties and conditions, whether express, implied or statutory, including, but not limited to, any (if any) warranties or conditions of or related to: non-infringement, merchantability. Motorola Solutions has the tools you need to get the job done in any organization. Browse our product & service portfolio to find the right solution for your team. The Motorola 68000 series (also known as 680x0, m68000, m68k, or 68k) is a family of 32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessors.During the 1980s and early 1990s, they were popular in personal computers and workstations and were the primary competitors of Intel's x86 microprocessors.

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Part 1: A 16-bit processor with multiple 32-bit registers.

April 1983 © BYTE Publications Inc

Thomas W. Starnes
Motorola Inc., Microprocessor Division
3501 Ed Bluestein Blvd.
Austin, TX 78721

In the mid 1970s at Motorola, a new idea was taking shape. As more and more demands were being made on the MC6800 family of microprocessors, the push was on toward developing greater programmability of a 16-bit microprocessor. A project to develop the MC68000, known as Motorola's Advanced Computer System on Silicon (MACSS), was started.

The project team began with the freedom to design this entirely new product to best fit the needs of the microprocessor marketplace. Developers at Motorola explored many possibilities and made many difficult decisions. The result can be seen in the MC68000, viewed by most industry experts as the most powerful, yet easy to program, microprocessor available. In this first of four articles, I will discuss many of the philosophies behind the design choices that were made on the MC68000.

Many criteria can qualify a processor as an 8-, 16-, or 32-bit device. A manufacturer might base its label on the width of the data bus, address bus, data sizes, internal data paths, arithmetic and logic unit (ALU), and/or fundamental operation code (op code). Generally, the address mode were used, the EA would be the result of adding the contents of X with the given offset. Because EA evaluation takes time and can be a significant portion of the instruction, it is important to perform this quickly.

At one time, then, one 32-bit address and one 16-bit data calculation can take place within the MC68000. This speeds instruction execution time considerably by processing addresses and data in parallel. The MC68000 also operates on 32-bit data. This is usually done by taking two passes of 16-bit data, one for the lower word and one for the upper word. This is reflected in the execution time of many 16- and 32-bit instructions.

Prefetch Queue

Another way designers made the MACSS faster was to include what is called a prefetch queue. This prefetch queue is more intelligent than other microprocessor queues; its control varies according to the instruction stream contents.

The prefetch queue is a very effective means of increasing microprocessor performance; it attempts to have as much instruction information as possible available before a particular instruction begins execution. The microprocessor uses an otherwise idle data bus to prefetch from the instruction stream. This keeps the bus active more of the time, increasing performance because processing of instructions is often limited by the time it takes to get all the relevant information into the processor.

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The part of memory from which instructions are fetched, the program space, contains op codes and addressing information. The prefetch queue can contain enough information to execute one instruction, decode the next instruction, and fetch the following instruction from memory -- all at the same time.

Exactly what is in the queue is very dependent upon the exact instruction sequences. The queue is intelligent enough to stay fairly full without being too wasteful.

For instance, when a conditional branching instruction is detected, the prefetch is ready to either branch or not by the time a decision is made. The queue tries to fetch both the op code following the branch instruction and the op code at the calculated branch location. Then, when the condition codes are compared and a decision is made whether to branch, the processor can begin immediate decoding of either instruction. The other unnecessary op code is ignored.

You can use the prefetch queue in many other special ways as well. One example is in speeding up the repetitious Move Multiple Registers instruction, where it is used to accelerate successive data transfers. The prefetch queue allows many frequently used instructions to execute in exactly the time it takes to fetch the op code (actually, the time to prefetch the next op code).

Microcoding

One other significant implementation feature from the MACSS project emerged from the choice between a random logic design versus a microcoded design. Both techniques have advantages and disadvantages. Earlier microprocessors were largely of random logic design. Advanced techniques of very large scale integration (VLSI) and the increasing complexity of the chips have made microcoding more attractive.

Random logic design of a microprocessor or other logic device is the building of the device from discrete components-gates, buffers, and transistors. This limits the components to those that are essential. There are no unused gates, duplicated circuits, or clever uses of otherwise unused components. The design is usually packed as tightly as possible and is quite fast.

The difficulty is that, as the design becomes more and more complex, as VLSI has, the planning and layout of the components and signal traces become exponentially more difficult and often impossibly so. This means that it takes exorbitant amounts of time to design the circuits.

Another problem with the use of random logic in very complex circuits occurs in modeling and testing. Before such circuits are finally placed in silicon, they must be modeled and simulated on computers because of the great difficulty in running down bugs once the chip is in silicon compared to debugging a wire-wrap board. The entire circuit must be modeled all at once to ensure that one combination of signals affects only the expected section of the device.

Similarly, once the circuit is in silicon, the pass/fail testing of the components in a random logic chip is quite difficult. You typically have only a few lines to send sequences of patterns through for testing. Because a particular section of the circuit may be exercised only by a very few given inputs, a normal test may not detect a stuck gate or other error caused by some strange combination of inputs.

On the other hand, in much the same way that microprocessors made designing systems with medium-scale integration/large-scale integration (MSI/LSI) easier, microprogramming has come to ease the complications in the design of microprocessors. Microprogramming is to a microprocessor what a microprocessor is to a logic design of a system. A microprocessor has central components that can be considered black boxes with inputs and outputs. For each given operation (instruction, interrupt condition, etc.), the microprocessor can route certain information to these black boxes as inputs, and the outputs can be routed to other components. The control of this routing is performed by a microcontroller or microsequencer.

Similar to a microprocessor, the microsequencer directs the flow of data through the various components (ALU, registers, condition flags, shifters, buses, etc.) according to microprogrammed instructions. Each instruction has its own microroutine, or sequence of microwords, which routes the associated data to the proper component in the proper order. Conditions and branches may redirect the microroutines.

Microcoding a complex circuit simplifies design mostly because it makes the circuit modular. It takes a controller, a block of microprogram, and the components through which data is to flow. Each of these elements may be modeled, built, and tested with individual inputs and outputs. Microcoding is a big step toward simplifying the design process because it breaks up the design into manageable blocks, thereby easing the testing of the finished product.

Another advantage of microcoding is that it allows tremendous flexibility in the exact operation of the circuit. Its microwords allow more combinations of the inputs through the components than most random logic would allow. Microcoding's programmability makes it especially attractive to silicon designers because random logic in silicon is not easily changed.

Last-Minute Changes Possible

You can change the microROM of the microcoded device right up to the minute before the masks for the device are processed. To change a small facet of an operation may mean altering a few bits in the microROM, but this changes only whether or not there is a gate on the bit's transistor-a simple alteration. Similarly, after the silicon is cast, should a change be necessary, it will likely be just a microcode change, which would be much easier than random logic modification in silicon.

The disadvantage of a microcoded circuit lies primarily in its generality. Because it is made up of modules and is programmed, the microcoded circuit is more wasteful of transistors and therefore makes a larger circuit. This may add up to 20 percent more board space or chip area than a tight random logic design. But microcoding has advantages that make up for this disadvantage, making it the design choice for modern VLSI circuits.

There are two types of microprogramming, horizontal and vertical (see figure 4). Horizontal microcoding is the more direct form. It is unencoded, so that, for instance, 1 bit in each microword would enable each register. For 16 registers, then, 16 bits of microcode must be dedicated. Horizontal microwords tend to be quite long, and because the size of the microcode directly affects chip size, they can quickly increase chip cost.

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Figure 4:Comparison of horizontal and vertical microcode patterns.

A denser but slower form of microcoding is vertical microcoding. Here, control functions are encoded, so that only 4 bits of microcode are required to select one of 16 registers. While it needs a much shorter microword, vertical microprogramming is potentially slower than horizontal microprogramming. Vertical microprogramming will take at least one level of logic gates to decode the encoded signals. This level of gates may just throw the total gate propagation delay over the threshold of the clock pickets, forcing an additional clock cycle into the instruction.

In the MACSS project, the MC68000 was selected to be microcoded. In retrospect this was a very wise decision. The first silicon prototype worked well enough so that the major circuits in the device could be tested, and subsequent 'fixes' were often just microcode corrections. The instruction set was not firm until just before the masks went to wafer fabrication, allowing some late decisions to be made to improve the performance of the chip.

A combination of horizontal and vertical microcoding was used on the MC68000 to gain the optimum advantages of both. Essentially, a microcode and a nanocode were developed. The microcode is a series of pointers into assorted microsubroutines in the nanocode. The nanocode performs the actual routing and selecting of registers and functions, and directs results. This combination is quite efficient because a great deal of code can share many common routines and yet retain the individuality required of different instructions.

Decoding of an instruction's op code generates starting addresses in the microcode for the type of operation and the addressing mode. Completion of an instruction enables interrupts to be accepted or allows access to the prefetch queue for the next op code. The prefetch queue actually keeps bus use at 85 to 95 percent, i.e., the bus is idle only 5 to 15 percent of the time!

Conclusion

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Let's look back now at the MC68000 and see what parts of it might qualify it as a 16-bit device. The internal data ALU is 16 bits. It processes 32-bit addresses, though only 24 bits are brought off chip. The op code that tells the processor what operation to perform is 16 bits wide. The data bus is 16 bits wide. The microprocessor will operate on either 8, 16, or 32 bits of data automatically. There are 16 general-purpose 32-bit-wide registers in the chip.

The MC68000 is generally considered a 16-bit microprocessor, though it uses 32-bit addresses and contains 32-bit registers. It also can operate on 32 bits of data as easily as 8 and 16. Many users of the MC68000 consider it a 32-bit just as much as a 16-bit processor. Whatever you consider it there is no doubt that the MC68000 is indeed a powerful microprocessor. In coming articles, I will discuss in more detail exactly what operations are available in the MC68000 and will illustrate examples of MC68000 code.

MC68010

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Motorola has recently developed an improved version of the MC68000: the MC68010. It is completely compatible with object codes of earlier versions of the 68000 and has added virtual memory support and improved loop instruction execution.

By using virtual memory techniques. the 68010 can appear to access up to 16 megabytes of memory when considerably less physical memory is available to a user. The physical memory can be accessed by the micro processor while a much larger 'virtual' memory is maintained as an image on a secondary storage device such as a floppy disk. When the microprocessor is instructed to access a location in the virtual memory that is not within the physical memory (referred to as a page fault), the access is suspended while the location and data are retrieved from the floppy disk and placed into physical memory. Then the suspended access is completed. The 68010 provides hardware support for virtual memory with the ability to suspend an instruction when a page fault is detected and then to complete the instruction after physical memory has been updated.

The MC68010 uses instruction continuation rather than instruction restart to support virtual memory. When a page fault occurs, the microprocessor stores its internal state on the supervisor stack. When the page fault has been repaired, the previous internal state is reloaded into the microprocessor, and it continues with the suspended instruction. Instruction continuation has the additional advantage of handling hardware support for virtual I/O devices.

As mentioned in the body of this article, the 68000 uses a prefetch queue to improve the speed of instruction execution. The 68010 goes one step further by making the prefetch queue more intelligent. Detection of a three-word looping instruction will put the microprocessor into a special mode. In this loop mode, the microprocessor will need only to make data transfers on the bus, because it latches up the queue and executes the instruction repeatedly out of the queue. Once the termination condition for the loop is reached, normal operation of the prefetch queue is resumed. This operation is invisible to the programmer and provides efficient execution of program loops.

About the Author
Thomas Starnes is an electrical engineer who has spent the last five years helping to plan the direction of the MC68000 family of processor products for Motorola.