Introduction to Seminar Topic on SHARC Processor:
Real time applications require fast and accurate processors and that can run in real time environments. To meet the requirement we have special processor named as SHARC processor. These processors are specially designed for such real time applications. These processors are very fast and flexible. They have efficient program sequencing and follow looping mechanism for any computation. They execute each line and then they go to other line.
SHARC memory holds both data and instructions and the extra data are moved to the on chip memory. They fetch data from both the memory in parallel. They use PM bus to fetch instruction or data. There are total sixteen registers used and each has two sets (primary and alternate). Registers r0-r15 or f0-f15 is the primary registers. These primary registers are used for data operations and registers from f0-f15 are used for floating point operations.
Processor has three main functions unit like ALU, multiplier and a shifter. SHARC has the ability to perform saturation arithmetic on any fixed point value. This saturation mode is controlled by the ALUSAT in the mode1 register. This processor doesn’t have divide instruction. Two operations are used to start and iterative algorithms like RECIPS and RSQRTS. It has multiplier that performs multiplications of fixed point and floating point multiplication.
This processor allows us to perform more than one calculation simultaneously. Programmers can put long instructions in the memory and execute them. They can execute more than one instruction at the same time. It reduces the instruction load in the memory that has same operations. They execute few parallel instructions that are hidden from the programmer. In short we can say that all the processors are same but their functionality is different for different applications.
Download Seminar Report on SHARC Processor.