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We present a system that automatically generates a cycle-accurate and bit-true Instruction Level Simulator (ILS) and a hardware implementation model given a description of a target processor. An ILS can be used to obtain a cycle count for a given program running on the target architecture, while the cycle length, die size, and power consumption can be obtained from the hardware implementation model. These figures allow us to accurately and rapidly evaluate target architectures within an architecture exploration methodology for system-level synthesis.In an architecture exploration scheme, both the ILS and the hardware model must be generated automatically, else a substantial programming and hardware design effort has to be expended in each design iteration. Our system uses the ISDL machine description language to support the automatic generation of the ILS and the hardware synthesis model, as well as other related tools.

Abstract-We present a system that automatically generates a cycle-accurate and bit-true instruction level simulator (ILS) and a hardware implementation model given a description of a target processor. An ILS can be used to obtain a cycle count for a given program running on the target architecture, while the cycle length, die size, and power consumption can be obtained from the hardware implementation model. These figures allow us to accurately and rapidly evaluate target architectures within an architecture exploration methodology for system-level synthesis.In an architecture exploration scheme, both the ILS and the hardware model must be generated automatically, else a substantial programming and hardware design effort has to be expended in each design iteration. Our system uses the Instruction Set Description language to support the automatic generation of the ILS and the hardware synthesis model, as well as other related tools.

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We present the Instruction Set Description Language, ISDL, a machine description language used to describe target architectures to a retargetable compiler. The features and flexibility of ISDL enable the description of vastly different architectures, in particular VLIW architectures. ISDL explicitly supports constraints that define valid operation groupings within an instruction, increasing the range of specifiable architectures. We have written a tool that, given an ISDL description of a processor, automatically generates an assembler for it. Ongoing work includes the development of an automatic code-generator generator.