CSDL Home I ISVLSI 2007 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI '07). Emerging VLSI Technologies and Architectures
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Porto Alegre
March 9, 2007 to March 11, 2007
ISBN: 0-7695-2896-1
pp: 253-258
Alexandro Baldassin , State University of Campinas
Paulo Centoducatte , State University of Campinas
Sandro Rigo , State University of Campinas
Daniel Casarotto , Federal University of Santa Catarina
Luiz C. V. Santos , Federal University of Santa Catarina
Max Schultz , Federal University of Santa Catarina
Olinto Furtado , Federal University of Santa Catarina
ABSTRACT
Contemporary SoC design involves the proper selection of cores from a reference platform. Such selection implies the design exploration of alternative CPUs, which requires the generation of binary code for each possible target. However, the embedded computing market shows a broad spectrum of instruction-set architectures, ranging from micro-controllers to RISCs and ASIPs. As a consequence, binary utilities cannot always rely on pre-existent tools within standard packages. Besides, the task of manually retargeting every binary utility is not acceptable under time-to-market pressure. This paper describes a technique for the automatic generation of binary utilities from an abstract model of the target CPU, which can be synthesized from an arbitrary ADL. The technique is based upon two key mechanisms: model provision for tool generation (at the front-end) and automatic library modification (at the backend). To illustrate the technique?s automation effectiveness, we describe the generation of assemblers, linkers and disassemblers. We have successfully compared the files produced by the generated tools to those produced by conventional tools. Moreover, to give proper evidence of retargetability, we present results for MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC and i8051.
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CITATION
Alexandro Baldassin,
Paulo Centoducatte,
Sandro Rigo,
Daniel Casarotto,
Luiz C. V. Santos,
Max Schultz,
Olinto Furtado,
"Automatic Retargeting of Binary Utilities for Embedded Code Generation", ISVLSI, 2007, IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI '07). Emerging VLSI Technologies and Architectures,
IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI '07). Emerging VLSI Technologies and Architectures 2007, pp. 253-258, doi:10.1109/ISVLSI.2007.29