Design and Implementation of an Efficient Stack Machine

Although virtually every processor today uses a loadstore register architecture, stack architectures attract attention again due to the success of Java. The intermediate language of Java, the Java bytecodes, is stack based and therefore a hardware realization of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), a Java processor, is also stack based. In this paper two different architectures, found in Java processors, are presented. Detailed analysis of the JVM access patterns to the stack prove that a simpler and faster solution is possible. The proposed solution is a stack with two levels of on-chip cache.