VAX 9000 Series Digital TechnicalDigital Equipment Journal Corporation Volume 2 Number 4 Fall 1990 Editorial jane C. Blake, Editor Barbara Lindmark, Associate EditOr Circulation Catherine M. Phillips, AdministratOr Suzanne J. Babineau, Secretary Production Helen L. Patterson, Production Editor Nancy jones, Typographer Peter Woodbury, IllustratOr and Designer Advisory Board Samuel H. Fuller, Chairman Richard W. Beane Robert M. Glorioso john W. McCredie Mahendra R. Patel F. Grant Saviers Robert K. Spitz Victor A. Vyssotsky The Digital Technicaljoumal is published quarterly by Digital Equipment Corporation, 146 Main Street MLO I-31B68, Maynard, Massachusetts 01754-2571. Subscriptions tO the journalare S40.00 for four issues and must be prepaid in u.s. funds. University and college professors and Ph. D. students in the electrical engineering and computer science fields receive complimentary subscriptions upon request. Orders, inquiries, and address changes should be sent 10 The Digital Tecbnicaljournal at the published-by address. Inquiries can also be sent electronically 10 D'I:[email protected] Single copies and back issues are available for $16.00 each from Digital Press of Digital Equipment Corporation, 12 Crosby Drive, Bedford, MA 01730-1493. Digital employees may send subscription orders on the ENET to RDVAX::JOURNALor by interoffice mail to mailstop MLO I-3/B68. Orders should include badge number, cost center, site location code and address. U.S. engineers in Engineering and Manufacturing receive complimentary subscriptions; engineers in these organiza­ tions in countries outside the u.s. should contact the journal office to receive their complimentary subscriptions. All employees must advise of changes of address. Comments on the content of any paper are welcomed and may be sent to the editOr at the published-by or network address. Copyright ll:J 1990 Digital Equipment Corporation. Copying without fee is permitted provided that such copies are made for use in educational institutions by faculty members and are not distributed for commercial advantage. Abstracting with credit of Digital Equipment Corporation ·s authorship is permitted. AU rights reserved. The information in this Journal is subject 10 change without notice and should not be construed as a commitment by Digital Equipment Corporation. Digital Equipment Corporation assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this journal. ISSN 0898-901 X Documentation Number EY-E762 E-DP Cover Design The following are trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation: Digital s VAX 9000 mainframe system is the theme of this issue. Cl, DECsystem-10, DECSYSTEM-20, Digital, the Digital logo, HDSC, Our cover depicts several simple instructions flowing through MC!J, Micro VAX, Nl, PDP-I, Ul;fRIX, VAX, VAX-11/780, VAX 6000, the VAX 9000 instruction execution pipeline. High performance VAX 8000, VAX 8600, VAX 8650, VAX 9000, VAXBI, VMS, XMI. was achieved by breaking the VAX instructions into small simple IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines tasksthat could be pipelined efficiently. Concurrentoperation Corporation. on up to six instructions simultaneously resulted in a execution Kapton is a trademark of E. I. duPont de Nemours & Company. rate of one simple VAX instntction per clock period. MOSAIC 111 is a trademark of Motorola Corporation. Gloria Monroy of the High Performance Systems Group designed Micromaster Plus is a registered trademark of t.:rx Company. the cover graphic, which was implemented in cooperation Book production was done by Digital's Educational Services with David Comberg of the Corporate Design Group. Media Communications Group in Bedford, MA. I Contents 11 Foreword Carl S. Gibson VAX9000 Series 13 Design Strategy for the VAX9000 System David B. Fite Jr. , Tryggve Fossum, and Dwight Manley 25 VAXInstructions ThatIllu strate the Architectural Features of the VAX9000 CPU John E. Murray, Ricky C. Hetherington, and Ronald M. Salett 43 Semiconductor Technology in a High-peiformance VAX System Matthew J Adiletta, Richard L. Doucette, John H. Hackenberg, Dale H. Leuthold, and Dennis M. Litwinetz 61 Vector Processing on the VAX 9000 System Richard A. Brunner, Oileep P. Bhandarkar, Francis X. McKeen, Bimal Patel, William). Rogers Jr., and Gregory L. Yoder 80 HDSC and Multichip Unit Design and Manufacture Peter B. Dunbeck, Richard). Dischler, James B. McElroy, and Frank J. Swiatowiec 90 The VAX 9000 Service Processor Unit Matthew S. Goldman, Paul H. Dormitzer, and Paul A. Leveille 102 The Unique Features of the VAX 9000 Power System Design Derrick). Chin, Barry G. Brown, Charles F. Butala, Luke L. Chang, Steven). Chenetz, Gerald E. Cotter, BrianT. Lynch, Thiagarajan Natarajan, and Leonard J. Salafia 118 Synthesis in the CAD System Used to Design the VAX 9000 System Donald F. Hooper and John C. Eck 130 Hierarchical Fault Detection and Isolation Strategy for the VAX9000 System Karen E. Barnard and Robert P. Harokopus Editor'sIntroduction I implement the 77 different gate array chips, the five custom chips, and the self-timed RAM architecture. An additional performance improvement for numeric computations is the VAX vector architec­ ture and is treated in the paper by Rich Brunner, Dileep Bhandarkar, Frank McKeen, Bimal Patel, Rill Rogers, and Greg Yoder. They discuss the architec­ tural model and particulars of the VAX 9000 imple­ mentation, which affords numerically intensive applications performance four to five times greater than can be achieved by the scalar processor. To ensure that the system performance gains at the semiconductor level were not diminished jane C. Blake but were instead enhanced by packaging and inter­ Editor connects, engineers developed several technologies The VAX 9000, Digital's first mainframe computer, unique in the industry. The technology behind the is the topic of papers in this issue of the D(f.{ital high-density signal carrier and the multichip unit Te chnical jo urnal. As engineers writing for this are explained in the paper by Pete Dunbeck, Rich issue relate, the primary goal of the project from the Dischler, Jim i'vlcEiroy, and Frank Swiatowiec. initial product strategy through manufacture was to Equally important to performance in the new design and build a very high-performance, highly 9000 is system reliability as e\'idenced by the intro­ reliable VAX system. duction of the service processor unit. In their paper Design engineers applied both crsc and R!SC about the service processor, Matt Goldman, Paul techniques to achieve high levels of performance Dormitzer, and Paul Leveille relate how the for this rightly coupled multiprocessor system. MicroVAX-based system embedded within the 9000 In the opening paper, Dave Fire, Tryggve Fossum, detects, isolates, and corrects problems without and Dwight Manley explain the strategy behind the interrupting the system . design. They begin with an overview of the system, High system availability \Vas also one impetus in the technology, and CAD tools, and then describe the design of the power system . Some of the unique the redesign of VAX instructions into small tasks features of the power system, such as redundant which can be efficiently pipe lined. The authors regulators, improved load sharing and simula­ also touch upon three additional aspects of the tion, are discussed by Derrick Chin, Barry Brown, VAX 9000 system: the integration of vector process­ Charles Butala, Luke Chang, Steve Chenetz, Jerry ing into the VAX architecture, new error handling Cotter, Brian Lynch, Raj Natarajan, and Len Salafia. techniques, and performance modeling. The two papers that close this issue address the One measure of performance is the number of topics of CAD methodology and system diagnosis. instructions processed per cycle. The average num­ Don Hooper and John Eck describe a CA D method­ ber of cycles per instruction is less than five, which ology that combines advanced rule-based A! tech­ is nearly half the instruction execution rate of pre­ niques with an object-oriented database. The new vious VAX systems. To illustrate the architectural methodology saves logic designers significant time features that enable this level of performance, John and reduces errors. A complex system such as the Murray, Rick Hetherington, and Ron Salett have VAX 9000 requires improved system diagnosis capa­ selected a small sample of VAX instructions. They bilities to achieve the desired high system availabil­ describe the instruction flow through the pipeline, ity. Karen Barnard and Rob Harokopus demonstrate how instruction features combine to work on a sin­ how a new scan system, in combination with scan gle macro, and how stages of the pipeline interact. pattern testing, and symptom-directed diagnosis ln addition to the architectural improvements, achieve this necessary diagnosis capability. machine performance is enhanced at the semi­ The editors thank Rick Hetherington of the High conductor level by a new generation of semicustom Performance Systems Group for not only writing a and custom integrated circuits that support a low paper but for his help in coordinating this issue. cycle time. Matt Acliletta, Dick Doucette, John Hackenberg, Dale Leuthold, and Dennis Litwinetz give an overview of the bipolar technology used in the system. They then describe the methods used to 2 Biographies I Matthew J. Adiletta Matthew Adiletta is currently contributing to the implementation of a new processor architecture and performing a technology evaluation to determine the technology for the implementation. He joined Digital in 1985 to work on a high-performance RISC architecture. Matt was not only the architect for the VAX 9000 system, but he also implemented the integer and floating point multiply and divide units and developed an ECL custom chip process. He holds one patent and has several patents pending. Man received a B.S. E. E. (honors, 1985) from the University of Connecticut. Karen E. Barnard A senior software engineer with the High Power Business Unit CPU Development Group, Karen Barnard wrote the read-only memory­ based diagnostic for the VAX 9000 service processor unit's scan control module and developed the scan pattern diagnostic for the VAX 9000 CPU and SCU.