THE ARCHITECTURE OF A VIETNAMESE 32-BIT RISC MICROPROCESSOR, THE VN1632

Abstract

VN1632 is the first 32-bit Vietnamese-designed microprocessor. Its design is based on the Harvard 32-bit RISC architecture but with a five-stage pipeline. This article presents the architecture overview and the implementation of the microprocessor. The overview shows main features, the block diagram and descriptions of most salient blocks, namely registers and pipeline. The implementation describes the design detail of each block. A detailed simulation was carried out to check the overall performance of the design which was then entrusted to an American fab for fabrication using the 0.13um IBM process. Testing results of VN1632 proved that the architecture works correctly with desired performance.