Forum Discussion

Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
13 years ago

Start and done ports of multicycle custom instruction

Hi everyone,

I have read through the NIOS II Custom Instruction User Guide and there is one thing I am not really clear about:

For a variable multicycle custom instruction, the ci master asserts start for one cycle, and the done output should notify the processor once the result is valid. However, what I am wondering is, isn't the information contained in start and done highly correlated to the information in clk_en?

I.e.: Rising edge of clk_en <-> start; falling edge of clk_en <-> done.

Is that right or is there something wrong in my thinking?

And if I am right, so why would you still need extra start and done ports then?

Many thanks.

Jimmy

1 Reply

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    13 years ago

    That wouldn't work at all for instructions that take a variable number of cycles.

    I'd actually check that 'clk_en' isn't actually used when the processor needs to stall the custom instruction unit because of a pipeline stall somewhere. In which case 'done' would only be actioned when 'clk_en' was valid.

    I've only written combinatorial instructions though.

    If something is a 'bit too slow' for a single cycle combinatorial instruction it might be worth using 2 instrcutions and cycling a 32bit intermediate through a cpu register. That would give a 2 cycle instruction with no result delay.