ARM9E Processor Specification for OPTIMIST
David Landén · 2005
This thesis work provides hardware specifications of the ARM9E microprocessor for the retargetable code generator framework OPTIMIST. We evaluate and compare the code quality of OPTIMIST to a commercial C/C++ compiler for the ARM9E architecture. Since OPTIMIST is a retargetable code generator it needs both a source code file of the program to generate code for (written in C) and a hardware description file of the processor. The main part of this thesis describes how the specification files for ARM9E are created, using a hardware description language called ADML (Architecture Description Mark-up Language). Finally, as the language could not cover all parts of the processors features, it was extended with new constructs, that are developed in the thesis. OPTIMIST generated faster code to all test programs compared to the results from LCC with ARM as back-end. In the comparison between OPTIMIST and the compiler from IAR Workbench, OPTIMIST generated just as fast code for every other of the test programs, but the IAR compiler generated faster solutions for the rest of the test programs. This is true for both ARM and Thumb mode.