Research On Key Technologies Of RISC Engine In Network Processor

The purpose of this paper is to do some technolodgies preparation for the Eleventh Five-year National Pre-Research Project, "High-powered Military Network Processor Technolodgy".Observing and studying the usage of RISC engines on network processor, this paper emphasizes on the key technolodgies of RISC pipeline. And a fundamental RISC pipeline is designed. Furthermore a CRC32 parallel computing module is embedded to the pipeline.The paper is organized in three parts as following:Firstly, the important usage of RISC engine on network processor is introduced.Then the key technolodgies of RISC pipeline is explained in detials. The data hazard and control hazard bringed by pipeline are discussed. And also the methors to solve the data hazard such as the bypass, register rename and reservation station thechnoledgies, and the methors to solve control hazard such as dynamic branch prediction, and some advance RISC architecture such as hardware-based speculation and mutil-issue technoledgy developed for higher instruction-level parallelism are also explained.At last, the paper gives an introduction of OpenRISC architecture, which is an open source RISC CPU. And a RISC pipeline is designed with VerilogHDL, refrencing to OpenRISC source code. Furthermore a CRC32 parallel computing module is embedded to meet the need of network protocols processing. And the Design has been testified by software simulation.