User aspects of MICE

MICE is a MICro-programmable Engine designed for on-line filtering applications. It efficiently emulates the PDP-11 fixed-point instruction set. This feature facilitates the development of user software as algorithms can be coded in the standard languages (FORTRAN, PL11, Assembler, etc.). MICE executes PDP-11 code 3 times faster than a PDP-11/70, or 10 times faster than a PDP-11/34. Algorithms can be made to run faster by micro-coding the time critical part of the code (often a small fraction of the total code). Further speed increases can be achieved by attaching special-purpose hardwired logic to the CPU. The architecture of MICE has been described elsewhere (HALAT80); in this paper we describe those features which make it a user-friendly device in the real-time experimental environment encountered at CERN.