Lambda the Ultimate

A Tiny Computer. An unpublished memo by Chuck Thacker, Microsoft Research, 3 September 2007. Posted with permission.

Alan Kay recently posed the following problem:

"I'd like to show JHS and HS kids 'the simplest non-tricky architecture' in which simple gates and flipflops manifest a programmable computer”.

Alan posed a couple of other desiderata, primarily that the computer needs to demonstrate fundamental principles, but should be capable of running real programs produced by a compiler. This introduces some tension into the design, since simplicity and performance sometimes are in conflict.

This sounded like an interesting challenge, and I have a proposed design.

Presents the design of a complete CPU in under two pages of FPGA-ready Verilog. The TC3 is a Harvard architecture 32-bit RISC with 1KB of instruction memory, 1KB of data memory, and 128 general-purpose registers. This design is an ancestor of the DDR2 DRAM Controller used in the BEE3.

To help us into the brave new world of Hardware/Software co-design!