Specification of Intel IA-32 Using an Architecture Description Language

Abstract

Designing, testing, and producing a new computer processor is a complex and very expensive process. To reduce costly mistakes in hardware, the microarchitecture is usually designed and tested with the aid of a software simulator. The FAST System enables microarchitects to develop architecture simulators rapidly and is less error-prone than using a high level language such as C. In this paper, we describe how the FAST System's Architecture Description Language (ADL) has been extended to facilitate the description of complex instruction sets such as Intel's IA-32 instruction set architecture. In this respect, we demonstrate that the notion of inheritence, a key concept in object oriented programming languages can be extended for selective inheritence to enable the specification of complex instruction set architectures in architecture description languages.

A Bio-Inspired Approach to Selective Inheritance Modeling

“…This approach is needed in any application that significantly uses the inheritance, so, it can be applied to select the best object parameters in any object-oriented computer environment. As an example, in hardware field, (the micro-architecture is usually designed and tested with the aid of a software simulator) where designing, testing, and producing a new computer processor is complex, the work [6] has proposed a specification of INTEL IA-32 using an architecture description language that selectively pre-determined the parent with the best fit to the object. Also our approach may be applied in several works: Software Process Modeling, Software Reengineering, Software Reuse and relational databases.…”

“…Although several works have agreed on the importance of using selective inheritance concept [5,8], and others have proposed it as a solution to use in their works [6,9,10], the proposed S.I approach did not completely solve all conventional inheritance problems; because it also has been applied on the "is-a" model, and even worse, it has created two other new problems: where should the property be chosen, at class level or at object level? And it was not supported by any object oriented programming language.…”

“…The Selective Inheritance (S.I) was the promising approach [5][6][7]; where through it we can limit the amount of information in each object, by inheriting the needed properties from specific ancestors, and solve overlapping problems, by choosing the appropriate property from two or more contradictories.…”