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Many of my designs have multiple configurations. For example:

  • The ZipCPU supports both pipelined and non-pipelined implementations. How shall the CPU be verified? Against a pipelined implementation or a non-pipelined one?

  • The ZipCPU supports a compressed instruction set. This costs area. Although the area cost is minimal, what if I don’t want to support it?

  • The ZipCPU can be built either with or without a user mode. Many micro controller environments don’t need the user mode together with the headaches associated with using it. How shall I make sure this supervisor-only mode remains supported, even if I don’t use it very often?

This quiz gets to the answer to these questions.