A 120-MHz BiCMOS superscalar RISC processor

A superscalar RISC processor contains 2.8 million transistors in a die size of 16.2 mm/spl times/16.5 mm, and utilizes 3.3 V/0.5 /spl mu/m BiCMOS technology. In order to take advantage of superscalar performance without incurring penalties from a slower clock or a longer pipeline, a tag bit is implemented in the instruction cache to indicate dependency between two instructions. A performance gain of up to 37% is obtained with only a 3.5% area overhead from our superscalar design. >