SPARC architecture and processor implementation

In the early 1980s a group of research engineers at Berkeley University in California were involved in a project to build a RISC machine. Their approach was later adopted and refined for commercial purposes by Sun Microsystems. The resulting architecture, SPARC, was incorporated into a product for the first time in 1987. Most people in the computer industry now accept that Sun's recent dominance of the work station market has been largely achieved due to SPARC's cost/performance advantage over competing alternatives. The aim of this paper is to explain how Cypress Semiconductor became involved in the SPARC programme and the basic decisions which were made at the outset of developing their first generation of RISC products.<>