If we enlarge the view to 1 microsecond, the operation of the micro machine comes into view.

la shot 1us

 

Signals

MSYN. SSYN: UNIBUS handshake signals between CPU and ROM

PROCCLK: clock of micro machine

MPC:  9 bit micro program counter, which addresses the micro instructions.

What you see

The screen shot shows the micro steps following the fetch of the first instruction after BOOT. Marker "D" is at the same position as in the previous zoom level.

You can distinguish four pulses of clock signal PROCCLK. This is the basic CPU clock for the micro program counter. Modern micro processors have a clock corresponding to the instruction cycle, but the PDP-11 has a clock signal driving the micro machine. The pulses are some 200 nanosconds apart and 30ns width.

The micro program counter changes a lot, but on the falling edge of PROC CLK it is always stable. At this point the next micro instruction is fetched and executed, after that the MPC changes again as result of address re-calculation.

The micro steps in the screen shot are these:

Marker MPC
(hex)
MPC
(octal)

DEC original
micro step docu

Info
D 0x00E 016

Fetch next instr,
load into IR

 

SSYN Low->High
Fetch of instruction at address 0xA10 = 165020
ROM responds with 0x03 = 5003 = "clr r3"

C 0x00D 015 Increment  PC,
Micro branch on instruction
R7 is increment by 2
E 0x020 040 SOP

Data "5003" is decoded. The MPC is cleared and overlaid with data from the instruction decoder ROMs.
Resulting MPC is 040, which processes all
"Single OPerand" instructions.
Control singals for register addresses, ALU and data path multiplexers are specific to the instruction, but MPC is same for all "SOPs".

The "CLR" instruction needs only one micro step.
Other instructions may have many more (MUL, DIV)

F 0x000 000 Service Intr/Traps,
store vector
After every instruction, the loop returns to MPC 000.
Here status bits are scanned for errors or interrupts.
G 0x00E 016 Fetch next instr,
load into IR

Again the next instruction is fetched from UNIBUS,
address is taken from PC/R7.

MSYN will go low as soon SSYN goes low and the UNIBUS is released (the ROM still has SSYN High!)

 

See the start of the micro code flow charts in the PDP-11/34 field maintenance print set:

microcode flow main

 

Some remarks

Normally the cycles begins at MPC = 000 (trap service). But the instruction fetch at MPC=016 lasts very long, and PROC CLOCK is stopped until SSYN goes High again. Therefore we show here the steps between two fetches, from MPC=016 until MPC is 016 again.

At MPC = 000, the existence of traps, interrupts or error signals is checked. On any condition a branch to special micro code is executed. (Perhaps you learned the distinction between fast "Interrupt driven I/O"  and slow "polled I/O" ?  Well, here you see that on the micro code level, interrupts are merely polled by the micro code loop.)

At MPC =015, the program counter in R7 is incremented by 2. We will dive into this on the next page!

Between the PROCCLK pulses, there's a lot of changing on the MPC lines. Normally the next MPC is given by the current micro word (each micro instruction contains an implicit "GOTO"). But as signals loop through the data path circuits, MPC lines may be changed to execute "Branch On Micro Tests", so MPC has a lot of noise on it.