Modern embeddedsystems-on-Chips (SOCs) will allow the system designer to customize Intellectual Property (IP) cores (fixed and programmable), together with custom logic and large amounts of embedded memory. As the so...
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Modern embeddedsystems-on-Chips (SOCs) will allow the system designer to customize Intellectual Property (IP) cores (fixed and programmable), together with custom logic and large amounts of embedded memory. As the software content in these emerging embedded SOCs begins to dominate the SOC design process, there is a critical need for support of an integrated software development environment (including compilers, simulators and debuggers). Furthermore, since many characteristics of these processor core IPs (e.g., instruction-sets, memory configurations) are increasingly customizable, the entire software toolkit chain needs to be customized and generated to support both early design space exploration (for performance, power and cost constraints), as well as high-qualify software generation. This paper first surveys recent efforts in Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) used to perform early validation and exploration of SOC architectures. The second part of the paper focuses on approaches to software toolkit generation that automatically produce the software infrastructure (e.g., compilers, simulators, debuggers) which will enable true hardware/software codesign of these emerging embedded SOCs.
Reservation tables (RTs) have long been used to detect conflicts between operations that simultaneously access the same architectural resource. Traditional these RTs have been specified explicitly by the designer. How...
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Reservation tables (RTs) have long been used to detect conflicts between operations that simultaneously access the same architectural resource. Traditional these RTs have been specified explicitly by the designer. However, the increasing complexity of modern processors makes the manual specification of RTs cumbersome and error-prone. Furthermore, manual specification of such conflict information is infeasible for supporting rapid architectural exploration. We present an algorithm to automatically generate RTs from a high-level processor description, with the goal of avoiding manual specification of RTs, resulting in more concise architectural specifications and also supporting faster turn-around time in design space exploration. We demonstrate the utility of our approach on a set of experiments using the TI C6201 VLIW DSP and DLX processor architectures, and a suite of multimedia and scientific applications.
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