Application-driven design automation for microprocessor design

The authors present an overview of the application-driven design automation system (ADAS) for microprocessor design. ADAS accepts a specification of the instruction set architecture as input, and produces both layout specified in Caltech Intermediate Form, and a reorder table for the language compiler as output. The system spans language design, compiler design, instruction set design, microarchitecture, and VLSI implementation. Another goal of the project is to determine the feasibility of applying formal methodology to design automation and the usefulness of formal syntax and semantics in defining the meaning of specifications. The system implementation on a real industrial example, the TDY-43 processor, is discussed