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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Index Terms
A microarchitecture description language for retargeting firmware tools
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