WG211/M8ODonnell

Datapath and control correspond to language and program

John O'Donnell

Complex digital circuits are usually organised in two sections: datapath and control. Traditional circuit design methodology views these sections as just hardware systems, but they can also be understood using language terminology: the datapath provides a set of constructs, while the control expresses an algorithm in terms of those constructs. Thus a datapath defines a domain specific language, while the control is a program in that language. This correspondence can be exploited to clarify the design of processors.