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What are SHARC Processors?
1-4 Getting Started With SHARC Processors
Common Architectural Features
SHARC processors share the following architectural features.
• 32/40-bit IEEE floating-point math
• 32-bit fixed-point multipliers with 64-bit product and 80-bit accu-
mulation
• No arithmetic pipeline. All computations are single cycle.
• Circular buffer addressing supported in hardware
• Sixteen address pointers supporting 16 circular buffers
• Six nested levels of zero-overhead looping in hardware
• Rich algebraic assembly language syntax
• Conditional arithmetic, bit manipulation, divide and square root,
bit field deposit and extract supported by instruction set
• Zero-overhead background transfers at full clock rate without pro-
cessor intervention
In the core, every instruction can execute in a single cycle. The buses and
instruction cache provide rapid unimpeded data flow to the core to main-
tain the execution rate.
Figure 1-1 shows a detailed block diagram of a single core SHARC 32-bit
processor and the I/O processor (IOP). It illustrates the following archi-
tectural features:
• Two processing elements (PEx and PEy), each containing 32-bit
IEEE floating-point computation units—multiplier, arithmetic
logic unit (ALU), shifter, and data register file
• Program sequencer with related instruction cache, interval timer,
and data address generators (DAG1 and DAG2)