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Chapter 7

Some aspects of the logical design of a control computer: a case study1

R. L. Alonso / H. Blair-Smith / A. L. Hopkins

Summary Some logical aspects of a digital computer for a space vehicle are described, and the evolution of its logical design is traced. The intended application and the characteristics of the computer's ancestry form a framework for the design, which is filled in by accumulation of the many decisions made by its designers. This paper deals with the choice of word length, number system, instruction set, memory addressing, and problems of multiple precision arithmetic.

The computer is a parallel, single address machine with more than 10,000 words of 16 bits. Such a short word length yields advantages of efficient storage and speed, but at a cost of logical complexity in connection with addressing, instruction selection, and multiple-precision arithmetic.

1. Introduction

In this paper we attempt to record the reasoning that led us to certain choices in the logical design of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). The AGC is an onboard computer for one of the forthcoming manned space projects, a fact which is relevant primarily because it puts a high premium on economy and modularity of equipment, and results in much specialized input and output circuitry. The AGC, however, was designed in the tradition of parallel, single-address general-purpose computers, and thus has many properties familiar to computer designers [Richards, 1955], [Beckman et al., 1961]. We will describe some of the problems of designing a short word length computer, and the way in which the word length influenced some of its characteristics. These characteristics are number system, addressing system, order code, and multiple precision arithmetic.

A secondary purpose for this paper is to indicate the role of evolution in the AGC's design. Several smaller computers with about the same structure had been designed previously. One of these, MOD 3C, was to have been the Apollo Guidance Computer, but a decision to change the means of electrical implementation (from core-transistors to integrated circuits) afforded the logical designers an unusual second chance.

It is our belief, as practitioners of logical design, that designers, computers and their applications evolve in time; that a frequent reason for a given choice is that it is the same as, or the logical next step to. a choice that was made once before.

A recent conference on airborne computers [Proc. Conf. Spaceborne Computer Eng., Anaheim, Calif., Oct. 30-31, 1962] affords a view of how other designers treated two specific problems: word length and number system. All of these computers have word lengths of the order of 22 to 28 bits, and use a two's complement system. The AGC stands in contrast in these two respects, and our reasons for choosing as we did may therefore be of interest as a minority view.

2. Description of the AGC

The AGC has three principal sections. The first is a memory, the fixed (read only) portion of which has 24,576 words, and the erasable portion of which has 1024 words. The next section may be called the central section; it includes, besides an adder and a parity computing register, an instruction decoder (SQ), a memory address decoder (S), and a number of addressable registers with either special features or special use. The third section is the sequence generator which includes a portion for generating various microprograms and a portion for processing various interrupting requests.

The backbone of the AGC is the set of 16 write busses; these are the means for transferring information between the various registers shown in Fig. 1. The arrowheads to and from the various registers show the possible directions of information flow.

In Fig. 1, the data paths are shown as solid lines; the control paths are shown as broken lines.

Memory: fixed and erasable

The Fixed Memory is made of wired-in "ropes" [Alonso and Laning, 1960], which are compact and reliable devices. The number of bits so wired is about 4 X 105. The cycle time is 12 m sec.

The erasable memory is a coincident current system with the same cycle time as the fixed memory. Instructions can address registers in either memory, and can be stored in either memory.

1IEEE Trans., EC-12 (6), 687-697 (December, 1963)

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