A 1GHz single-issue 64b powerPC processor

A 64b 1 GHz single-issue PowerPC processor containing 19M transistors was studied. The microprocessor was fabricated on a 0.12 μm six-layer copper interconnect complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS). The processor was implemented using delayed-reset and self-resetting dynamic circuit macros. The new features in the chip included fully pipelined floating-point unit (FPU), sum-addressed memory management units (MMU), improved clock generation and distribution and microarchitecture and floorplan to balance critical paths.