MADL Based Cycle Accurated Simulator Generation

As the complexity of CPU design increases, system-level design in early development stage is imposing more and more influence upon the chip performance. Therefore, generating a cycle-accurate-simulator (CAS) plays a key role in the chip design. It can help the designer explore the design space and evaluate the performance of the design. A method of building the design-space-exploration platform and generating CAS using MADL is proposed in this paper, and an implementation of CAS based on ARM7 is also given. It can be proved that using MADL we can generate CAS much easier and the performance of the CAS can be much better for it can accurately simulate the action of instruction flow in the pipeline each clock cycle..