ISDL: An Instruction Set Description Language For Retargetability
George Hadjiyiannis, Silvina Zimi Hanono, Srinivas Devadas · 2005
We present the Instruction Set Description Language, ISDL, a machine description language used to describe target architectures to a retargetable compiler. The features and flexibility of ISDL enable the description of vastly different architectures, in particular VLIW architectures. ISDL explicitly supports constraints that define valid operation groupings within an instruction, increasing the range of specifiable architectures. We have written a tool that, given an ISDL description of a processor, automatically generates an assembler for it. Ongoing work includes the development of an automatic code-generator generator. I. INTRODUCTION A. Embedded Systems For a variety of reasons, manufacturers profit from integrating an entire system on a single integrated circuit (IC). As time-to-market requirements place greater burden on designers for fast design cycles, programmable components are introduced into the system, and an increasing amount of system functionality is implemented in ...