Functional Specification and Simulation of Instruction Set Architectures

We use a functional Language to formally specify the semantics of an instruction set architecture. The resulting specification is more readable, modular, and concise than other semantic specification methods. The description is made clear and concise by creating semantic actions that represent basic architectural operations and by expressing each processor instruction and addressing mode in terms of these actions. The semantic description is directly coded in the functional language ML consequently providing an "executable specification" or simulator for the architecture. The semantic description is formal and can be used in other domains where a formal semantics of an architecture is needed, such as compiler/hardware verification and processor simulation. 1 Introduction An Instruction Set Architecture, or ISA, represents a view of a processor as seen by the assembly language programmer. An architectural specification includes all information needed to write correct programs and is ..