Simulation of a Horizontal Bit-Sliced Processor Using the ISPS Architecture Simulation Facility

The microprogrammed filter engine (MICE) is a fast, microprogrammable processor built with ECL bit slices (Motorola ECL 10800 series) intended primarily to be used as an on-line data filtering engine for high energy physics experiments. In this note we describe the use of a hardware description language used to model and simulate the hardware during its development. We treat the problem of describing a pipelined, horizontal (112 bits wide) host machine, implemented using bit slices with considerable potential for parallelism. Several levels of modeling are conceptually applicable to a problem of this nature and the note describes the thorough process followed before we decided on a particular style of description and simulation.