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UBC Theses and Dissertations
High-level cycle-accurate specification of microprocessors Chang, Felix Sheng-Ho
Abstract
This thesis introduces a new specification style for processor microarchitectures. My goal is to produce very simple, compact, but cycle-accurate descriptions that can be automatically simulated efficiently, in order to enable early exploration of different microarchitectures and their performance. The key idea behind my approach is that one can derive the difficult-to-design forwarding and stall logic completely automatically. I have implemented a specification language for pipelined processors, along with an automatic translator that creates cycle-accurate software simulators from the specifications. I have specified a pipelined MIPS integer core in my language. The entire specification is less than 300 lines long and implements all user-mode instructions except for coprocessor support. The resulting, automatically-generated, cycle-accurate simulator achieves over 240,000 instructions per second simulating MIPS machine code. This performance is within an order of magnitude of large, hand-crafted, cycle-accurate simulators, but my specification is far easier to create, read, and modify.
Item Metadata
Title |
High-level cycle-accurate specification of microprocessors
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Creator | |
Publisher |
University of British Columbia
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Date Issued |
2001
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Description |
This thesis introduces a new specification style for processor microarchitectures. My
goal is to produce very simple, compact, but cycle-accurate descriptions that can be
automatically simulated efficiently, in order to enable early exploration of different
microarchitectures and their performance. The key idea behind my approach is that
one can derive the difficult-to-design forwarding and stall logic completely automatically.
I have implemented a specification language for pipelined processors, along
with an automatic translator that creates cycle-accurate software simulators from
the specifications. I have specified a pipelined MIPS integer core in my language.
The entire specification is less than 300 lines long and implements all user-mode instructions
except for coprocessor support. The resulting, automatically-generated,
cycle-accurate simulator achieves over 240,000 instructions per second simulating
MIPS machine code. This performance is within an order of magnitude of large,
hand-crafted, cycle-accurate simulators, but my specification is far easier to create,
read, and modify.
|
Extent |
2874753 bytes
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Genre | |
Type | |
File Format |
application/pdf
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Language |
eng
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Date Available |
2009-08-04
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Provider |
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
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Rights |
For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.
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DOI |
10.14288/1.0051490
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URI | |
Degree | |
Program | |
Affiliation | |
Degree Grantor |
University of British Columbia
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Graduation Date |
2001-11
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Campus | |
Scholarly Level |
Graduate
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Aggregated Source Repository |
DSpace
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Item Media
Item Citations and Data
Rights
For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.