ISADL: An Instruction Set Architecture Description Language for VLIW
Xin Xiao, Zhong Liu · 2023
This paper presents a novel architecture description language for VLIW, which called Instruction Set Architecture Description Language (ISADL). The design of VLIW instruction sets is an iterative process, the addition and deletion of instructions leads to issues such as encoding inefficiency, format adjustment, and decoding complexity. Previous architecture description languages have overlooked the stage of instruction format design, resulting in the need for a large amount of hard coding to support automatic tool chain generation. We propose two algorithms for automatic generation of instruction formats and variable length encoding for instruction format design. Our method solves a large number of hard coding problems by automatically generating tool chain models, while also optimizing the convenience and assembly speed of the automatically generated assembler. This paper delineates this technology and evaluates it on the MT-3000, MT-7004 and XT-4000 ISA. The experimental results demonstrate that it can automatically and quickly generate encoding schemes and optimize the issues in instruction format design. This can effectively accelerate the progress of the instruction set design.