Automatic ADL-based assembler generation for ASIP programming support

Abstract

Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) may be built upon general purpose CPUs or application-specific instruction-set processors (ASIPs). On the one hand, ASIPs allow a tradeoff between flexibility, performance and energy efficiency. On the other hand, since an ASIP is not a standard component, embedded software code generation cannot rely on pre-existent tools. Each ASIP requires a distinct toolkit. To cope with time-to-market pressure, automatic toolkit generation is required. Architecture description languages (ADLs) are the ideal starting point for such automation. This paper presents robust and efficient techniques to automatically generate a couple of tools (assembler and pre-processor) from the ADL description of a given target processor. Tool robustness results from formal techniques based on context-free grammars. Tool efficiency evidence is provided by experiments targeting three CPUs: MIPS, PowerPC 405 and PIC 16F84. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.