Inside the armv1 Register Bank - register selection

In an earlier post I reverse engineered the register bank, but stopped once I had identified the b3..b0 inputs for each of the 3 sets of register select logic. This information was summarised in a table which I've copied below:

Now that we have identified the Instruction Register it becomes practical to identify how these signals are derived.

Let's start with Read Bus B, bit 3:

This circuit is a 5 way input multiplexer (there are many similarities to the Read Bus Decoding logic we found earlier). The 5x AND gates forming the selection logic feed the multiplexer logic for all 4 bits.

The result, which includes all 4 bits can be summarised in the table below:

So the various PLA-2 outputs between them select whether Read Bus B has r14 (probably for the Branch and Link instruction), one of 3 different bit-regions of the currently executing instruction, or the output of the priority encoder. This last option will be for the LDM/STM load/store multiple registers instruction.

Read Bus A is also fed from a 5 way input multiplexer, but the selection logic is much simpler:

Two of the multiplexer "channels" comprise N-FETs (those driven by the inverters in the circuit above), with the and remaining "channels" constructed of P-FETs, The multiplexing operation across all 4 bits is:

The Write Bus is fed from a 5 way input multiplexer too, with the following circuit:

The results of it's multiplexing across all 4 bits is:

 Let's drill down on the priority-encoder signals.

So the 4 bit wide priority-encoder signal is delayed slightly before being used as input the Read Bus A multiplexer and Write Bus multiplexer. The circuit for the remaining 3 of the 4 bits is identical.

Conclusion

This analysis has significantly clarified our understanding of how the registers selection works - the PLA-2 outputs control which fields from the Instruction Register are used to select the 3x register bank inputs/outputs. There are a few exceptions where r14 or r15 is selected or the data from the priority encoder is used.

Only approximately 150 transistors are used to implement these circuits.