Abstract

Rapid Design Space Exploration (DSE) of a programmable architecture is feasible using an automatic toolkit (compiler, simulator, assembler) generation methodology driven byan Architecture Description Language (ADL). While many contemporary ADLs can effectively capture one class of architecture, they are typically unable to capture a wide spectrum of processor and memory features present in DSP, VLIW, EPIC and Superscalar processors. The main bottleneck has been the lack of an abstraction underlying the ADL (covering a diverse set of architectural features) that permits reuse of the abstraction primitives to compose the heterogeneous architectures. We present in this paper the functional abstraction needed to capture such wide varietyof programmable architectures. We illustrate the usefulness of this approachby specifying two very different architectures using functional abstraction. Our DSE results demonstrate the power of reuse in composing heterogeneous architectures using functional abstraction primitives allowing for a reduction in the time for specification and exploration by at least an order of magnitude.

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