Article 6MXAX Silicon Reverse Engineering: The 8085'S Undocumented Flags

Silicon Reverse Engineering: The 8085'S Undocumented Flags

by
hubie
from SoylentNews on (#6MXAX)

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2013/02/looking-at-silicon-to-understanding.html

The 8085 microprocessor has two undocumented status flags: V and K. These flags can be reverse-engineered by looking at the silicon of the chip, and their function turns out to be different from previous explanations. In addition, the implementation of these flags shows that they were deliberately implemented, which raises the question of why there [sic] were not documented or supported by Intel. Finally, examining how these flag circuits were implemented in silicon provides an interesting look at how microprocessors are physically implemented.

Like most microprocessors, the 8085 has a flag register that holds status information on the results of an operation. The flag register is 8 bits: bit 0 holds the carry flag, bit 2 holds the parity, bit 3 is always 0, bit 4 holds the half-carry, bit 6 holds the zero status, and bit 7 holds the sign. But what about the missing bits: 1 and 5?

Original Submission

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.

External Content
Source RSS or Atom Feed
Feed Location https://soylentnews.org/index.rss
Feed Title SoylentNews
Feed Link https://soylentnews.org/
Feed Copyright Copyright 2014, SoylentNews
Reply 0 comments