Design And Implementation Of Configurable Compiling Tools

In order to meet the changeable application requirements, configurable processor oriented SoC design has become one of the trends in the field of IC design. And compiling tools are very important in configurable processor system. It can not only help hardware designers to evaluate the ISA of the processor, but link the new processor system with huge amount of software resources together. However, the ISA of the configurable processor is changeable as it is application specified. In order to verify the effectiveness of the ISA and test its performance in real application, the compiling tools have to be modified or even redesigned correspondingly. Meanwhile, since the change request of ISA is always made by users rather than developers of compiling tools, the modifications of them are very time-consuming and they may seriously increase the time spent from configurable processor’s designing period to the ultimate application. How to reduce the developing time and requirement of compiling tools is an important topic in the field of configurable processor.In this research, we are dedicated to design and implement a suit of configurable compiling tools so as to give a flexible solution. After carefully analyzing and evaluating various compiling platforms, we choose GNU Binutils and GCC as the prototypes, considering both the efficiency and generality of them. Based on our in-depth analysis and discussion of the principle of the prototypes,we port them to a platform of configurable processor, which is developed by others in our group, and then do research on the configurability of compiling tools.During the research, we first conceptually define some configurable components and interfaces in accordance with the ISA’s changes, which can divide the configuration of the whole system into several pieces, and it is much easier to handle. In our assembler’s design, we propose an innovative method to construct an assembler with platform-independent structure, including the ISA’s static definition, lexical and semantic analysis of assemble file, dynamic parsing of assemble file and disassembling. In our compiler’s design, we reuse parsing and encoding procedures defined in the assembler and invent a simple but efficient scheme to describe the behavior of instructions, which could automatically generate the back end of compiler.To testify the viability of our work, we simulate the potential modifications of the ISA to verify the configurability of compiling tools, and the result shows that our work is very efficient.