Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Rapid Design Space Exploration (DSE) of a processor-memory architecture is feasible using automatic toolkit (compiler, simulator, assembler) generation methodology driven by an 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 architecture and memory features present in DSP, VLIW, EPIC and Superscalar processors. The main bottleneck has been the lack of a functional abstraction underlying the ADL covering a diverse set of heterogeneous architectures. We present in this report the functional abstraction needed to capture such wide variety of programmable embedded systems. We demonstrate the power of this approach by specifying two very different processor-memory architecture using functional abstraction approach. We outline the automatic software toolkit generation from the given ADL description using functional abstractions. We show initial results of rapid design space exploration of architectures specified using functional abstraction based ADL approach.