Towards a Systematic and Automated Approach in the Design of Processor Instruction Sets

Adopting a systematic approach for the design of a processor instruction sets is instrumental for tackling the complexity, which rules most of modern processors. We present a tool-chain which follows the designer through all the phases of the design, from the specification of instructions to the hardware synthesis of a microcontroller. The flow is also meant to simplify the understanding of the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) reference manuals. Often, these documents are semi-formal, hard to read and fully understand. We believe that designers will benefit from a visual graphbased model, automatically derived from the ISA specification, and customisable to fit different needs. Some of the tools have already been developed and tested on ARMv6-M architecture, others yet need to be fully implemented. The design flow will be integrated inside the Workcraft framework. We also compare the presented approach with the others available in the literature.