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A microarchitecture description language for retargeting firmware tools

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Published:01 December 1986Publication History
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Abstract

ARCHI is a microarchitecture description language designed to serve as the underlying language for a retargetable firmware development environment. ARCHI provides a hierarchical, procedural description at the register transfer level of the target microarchitecture. This description can then be utilized by a meta-environment to generate an instantiation of the firmware development environment for a specific target microarchitecture.

ARCHI has been successfully used to generate debugging simulators for the vertical Perkin-Elmer 3220, and the horizontal VAX-11/780. It is shown that if a microarchitecture description language is powerful enough to retarget a debugging simulator then it can be used to retarget almost every tool in a firmware development meta-environment, and that ARCHI accordingly satisfies its design objectives.

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            cover image ACM SIGMICRO Newsletter
            ACM SIGMICRO Newsletter  Volume 17, Issue 4
            Dec. 1986
            163 pages
            ISSN:1050-916X
            DOI:10.1145/19530
            Issue’s Table of Contents
            • cover image ACM Conferences
              MICRO 19: Proceedings of the 19th annual workshop on Microprogramming
              December 1986
              179 pages
              ISBN:081860736X
              DOI:10.1145/19551

            Copyright © 1986 Authors

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            Association for Computing Machinery

            New York, NY, United States

            Publication History

            • Published: 1 December 1986

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