Computer Laboratory

Bluepsec Examples

Thacker's Tiny Computer 3

Introduction

Turing award winner Charles (Chuck) Thacker has many decades of experience designing computer systems. He designed the Tiny Computer 3 in 2007 as a teaching aid - see the PDF paper. This paper presents the design design in a schematic form which is then implemented using primarily structural Verilog with Xilinx specific buffers and RAM blocks.

To better understand the design I created a Bluespec version - below - together with an embedded assembler in Bluespec. Then for 2nd year undergradute teaching purposes I created a SystemVerilog version in collaboration with summer intern, Frankie Robertson.

Contents

License

You are completely free to use these examples. See the license for further details.

Notes

  • build the design with the
    -agressive-conditions
    flag turned on since some rules depend the more flexible firing conditions that result