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Abstract-Due to the ever increasing number of microprocessors which can be integrated in very large systems on chip the need for robust, easily modifiable microprocessors has emerged. Within this paper a light-weight cycle compatible implementation of the MicroBlaze architecture called MB-LITE is presented in an attempt to fill the gap in quality between commercial and open source processors. Experimental results showed that MB-LITE obtains very high performance compared with other open source processors while using very few hardware resources. The microprocessor can be easily extended with existing IP thanks to an easily configurable data memory bus and a wishbone bus adapter. All components are modular to optimize design reuse and are developed using a two-process design methodology for improved performance, simulation and synthesis speeds. All components have been thoroughly tested and verified on a FPGA. Currently an architecture with four MB-LITE cores in a NoC architecture is in development which will be implemented in 90nm process technology.

We present a novel approach to extract the dynamically generated module hierarchy and its behavior from a SystemC model. SystemC is a popular modeling language which can be used to specify systems at a high abstraction level. The module hierarchy of a SystemC model is dynamically constructed during the execution of the elaboration phase of the model. This means that a system designer can build regular structures using loops and conditional statements. Currently, most SystemC tools can not cope with SystemC models for which the module hierarchy depends on dynamic parameters. In our approach this hierarchical information is retrieved by controlling and monitoring the executing of the elaboration phase of the model using a GDB debugger. Thereafter, the behavioral information is retrieved by using a GCC plug-in. This plug-in produces abstract syntax trees in static single assignment form. This behavioral information is linked with the hierarchical information. Our approach is completely non-intrusive. The SystemC model and the SystemC reference implementation can be used without any modification. We have implemented our approach in a SystemC front-end called SHaBE (SystemC Hierarchy and Behavior Extractor). This frontend facilitates the development of future SystemC visualization, debugging, static verification, and synthesis tools.

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