Microprogramming revisited

Abstract

It is the objective of this paper to briefly trace the history of the idea and the difficulties involved with defining or implementing it. In doing this, we first consider the general control problem and instruction formats. Next, storage implementations of the control function are considered and a restricted definition of microprogramming is proposed. This is then evaluated from a technological, architectural and programming point of view. We hope to show that our (demanding) definition of microprogramming is now technologically feasible and attractive from systems considerations.