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Design Progress in Bus Architecture for A1

A project log for AOZORA

home-brew 16-bit computer on breadboard

zxs-unzxs-un 03/12/2022 at 18:590 Comments

With just a flash in mind, being not a professional and starting from zero, after 3 weeks of search and learn, the bus architecture design for A1 finally came out.

At the very first beginning, project AOZORA was targeted to implement the Ibex RISC-V RV32EC core with mainly 74-series TTL ICs on solderless breadboards. 

After reading project Pineapple ONE, support for RV32EC was abandoned, since a 32-bit computer requires a lot more ICs than a 16-bit or 8bit computer, as well as the 32-bit bus might be too wide to implement on breadboards.

Data bus width was finally decided to be 16-bit, and address bus to be 32-bit.

First version of the bus architecture design for A1 is mainly inspired by the famous 6502, and was hugely influenced by load-store architecture commonly seen in RISC architectures.

A1 bus v1
Fig.1: Bus Architecture for A1, version 1

Just one day after the bus architecture idea on paper has been redrawn with software, when reading amazing home-brew computer projects on Hackaday, 2-Zons' project 8 Bit Breadboard CPU showed at SIMILAR PROJECTS.

After looking into the block diagram of that project, it is clear that A1 shares a very similar bus architecture with that project.

So the bus architecture for A1 got some refinement inspired by that project and thus comes the second version.

A1 bus v2
Fig.2: Bus Architecture for A1, version 2

Bus architecture design is now almost complete, though a comparator might be needed alongside the ALU and the address decoder might also need design in detail. Focus will be put on designing controller unit and instruction set then.

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