So I was wondering how multiple transistors coordinate to become a microprocessor.
In: Technology
First thing you need is a clock. Something which goes from 1 to 0 and back again repeatedly. This is provided by an external oscillator. Now you have to keep track of this time in order to know when to do things. To count the time you arrange the transistors into a counter, this is tricky and most digital designers surprisingly would not know how to make d type flip flops from individual transistors, it’s all in feedback, but I digress. Once you can count the clock, you can read instructions for the microprocessors instruction memory, which tells you which connections to make to the different blocks (memory, arithmetic blocks) and the rest is quite straight forward. The counter points to the next “thing to do” i.e instruction which says “add a and b” so you make connections which place a and b into the inputs to the processors calculator and hit go, the clock ticks, you count to the next instruction which tells you to connect the output from the alu to a piece of memory. These “connections” are the transistors themselves. Instructions are 1s and 0s which go into the “on/off” control pin of a transistor, which can be arranged into “gates” which can be built into functions. The magic behind microprocessors is the clock, keeing track of this allows you to run a sequence, which makes use of a set of fixed functional blocks to do an incredibly wide variety of tasks.
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