Date of Award

Fall 2004

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Electrical & Computer Engineering

Program/Concentration

Electrical Engineering

Committee Director

James F. Leathrum, Jr.

Committee Member

Lee A. Belfore II

Committee Member

Min Song

Call Number for Print

Special Collections LD4331.E55 S56 2004

Abstract

Instructions are the building blocks of computer programs. They are composed of opcodes, which uniquely identify each instruction, and the operands or data. In most architectures, the instruction length is a set multiple of the word size. The size and number of operands vary by instruction. Due to programmer usage, program need, or compiler design, opcodes do not occur with a constant distribution. Likely, some opcodes occur very frequently, whereas others occur very infrequently or not at all. If the length of an opcode were representative of its frequency, compression in program size might be achieved.

This thesis is an attempt to perform Huffman compression of instructions with the goal of achieving reasonable opcode compression, without overcomplicating the architecture. The Motorola 68HCI I was used as a baseline for the design, but the same methods can be applied to like microcontrollers and embedded systems.

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DOI

10.25777/gtt1-bg58

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