Design And Usage Of MIPS Simulator

With the arrival of post-PC era, embedded systems can be seen everywhere and the MIPS processors have a large market share. However, the faster process of designing the embedded systems has accelerated the renewing rate of embedded products. And the design of simulator meets the demand:On the one hand, the simulator achieves simulation of the target hardware by simulating the effectiveness of instructions executed on the target processor. By comparing the feedback information and expected information to assist the design of the embedded systems, the simulator technology has become very important in embedded systems design and software optimization. On the other hand, on-chip memory is a key part of the embedded systems, which has direct impacts on the overall performance of the systems. How to use the on-chip memory resources effectively becomes a key problem in embedded systems design. Therefore, it’s become a trend to apply simulator technology in embedded on-chip memory design and software optimization.This paper mainly studies two key technologies including the MIPS simulator design and data partitioning. In order to obtain the optimal performance for the specific application, the data partitioning technology generates strategies to make a reasonable distribution on the data object. Aiming at these two key technologies, the main work is as follows:Firstly, design MIPS simulator QtMips oriented memory hierarchy research. Not only does it support basic functions including edit, assemble, simulate and real-time control of the simulation, which collects and analyzes test program’s behavior effectively, but also supports the SPM/Cache memory hierarchy configuration and data partitioning configuration, which provides software support for data partitioning research. By adopting modular design concept, QtMips is designed into I/O module, configuration module, processing module and display module, etc.Secondly, implementation technologies are respectively studied according to the modular design of the QtMips. Then we analyze the two key technologies including serial assembly symbol address processing and memory hierarchy configurable simulation. Testing and verification shows that QtMips achieves the expected design goal. Finally, this paper puts forward to the TCG model as a new standard for measuring the data Cache misses, which considers the mainly key factors. The TCG data partitioning algorithm not only assigns data objects most vulnerable to conflict to SPM, but also considers the mapping relationship between the data object in off-chip memory and Cache to reduce the Cache missing rate. By algorithm simulation and performance analysis, it shows that the TCG data partitioning algorithm can make the best use of memory resources and improve memory performance.Through this paper’s research, we can get an effective general method of embedded on-chip memory design and software optimization with specific application. And this method can reduce the development cycle and production cost of the embedded systems design. In addition, this method can also make on-chip memory hardware match its software better, reduce the time that program access to the memory system, thus to improve system performance.