GAIA: a general application instruction set and architecture explorer

Abstract

Embedded Systems are dedicated to a task for their life time with no or slight modi cations. These systems are necessary in a wide range of industrial areas from entertainment industry to cryptography and from house appliances to army equipment. The emerging of processors with customizable instruction sets and customizable architectures has enabled the embedded processors to be tailored for the application they are dedicated to. Tailoring stands for improving incompetent parts of an application by modifying the processor. Development of design automation tools have been a new research era for embedded processors. They enable customization either by partial automation which requires human assistance at varying levels or by full automation. In this thesis, an automation tool GAIA that selects custom instructions (CI) and Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) style processing elements (PEs) has been developed. The system achieves customization by examining the intermediate representation (IR) of an application. It is a fuzzy expert system that acts as a voting mechanism evaluating the attributes of the application components. The work of this thesis contributes to the stage between the front-end and back-end compilation, with the aim of assisting back-end compilation at customization process.