Al Williams straddles the hardware and software line and has authored books ranging from MFC Black Book to Build Your Own Printed Circuit Board.. He can be contacted at [email protected]

One of the original "Star Trek" television episodes involves patients at a facility for the criminally insane. One of the inmates quotes some lines from Shakespeare and announces that she wrote it yesterday. Another character tells her that it had been written by the bard in the past. The woman replies, "Which does not alter the fact that I wrote it again yesterday!"

I suppose in the computer industry it is particularly difficult these days to have a truly original idea, even if you arrive at your idea independent of prior work. I had that experience several years ago. I had just finished a 16-bit CPU design based loosely on Caxton Foster's Blue machine in his excellent (albeit dated) book Computer Architecture. (Yes, I do have strange hobbies.) Like Foster's original, my machine has what I think of as a 1970's minicomputer architecture -- its very similar to a DEC or DG or HP machine from that era. I was contemplating starting a new project using some sort of RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture. RISC's advantages are well known. Simplifying the CPU core by reducing the complexity of the instruction set allows faster speeds, more registers, and pipelining to provide the appearance of single cycle execution. RISC has been so popular that even your PC today probably uses a RISC core that is emulating a non-RISC processor!

So I thought if the "R" in RISC is for reduced, how far can you reduce the instruction set of a computer and still make it do useful work? I realized that you could, in fact, make a perfectly functional computer with only a single simple instruction. I drew up several instruction set architectures and became very enamored of the idea. However, a search on the Internet showed that I wasn't the first person to have this realization. Although they aren't extremely common, OISC (short for "One Instruction Set Computers") have been proposed and built before. The type I had designed was known as a TTA (Transfer Triggered Architecture). There have been a few academic designs using this architecture as well as at least one commercial microcontroller (the Maxim MAXQ).

However, I still did not see some of the design features I wanted to explore in any existing implementation so I pressed ahead with the design of my CPU, the One-Der (with apologies to Tom Hanks). In this article, I describe One-Der -- a 32-bit TTA CPU that operates at roughly 10 MIPS. I also show you how and why you might actually want to use it. The complete source code and related files are available here. A demonstration of how you program One-Der is presented in this video.

What's the One Instruction?

When I tell this story in person, people are usually squirming with the inevitable question: What's the one instruction? It turns out there's several ways to construct a single instruction CPU, but the method I had stumbled on does everything via a move instruction (hence the name, "Transfer Triggered Architecture").

In a way, it is almost object oriented. Instead of normal instructions, you have functional units that expose addressable registers. Moving information into a "register" causes the functional unit to change. So as a simple example, consider a math functional unit -- what would pass for the accumulator on a normal processor. The functional unit might expose three registers. Register 0 would allow you to read and write data to the accumulator. Writing to register 1 would cause the unit to add the value you wrote to the accumulator while register 2 would subtract the value.

That's an overly simple example, but by building complex functional units you can build up an "instruction set" that does anything you want. Meanwhile, the basic CPU architecture remains very simple and stable. It simply orchestrates gating the contents of a register on the bus and then gating the bus into another register.