Co-Synthesis of Instruction Sets and Microarchitectures

The design of an instruction set processor includes several related design tasks: instruction set design, microarchitecture design, and code generation. Although there have been automatic approaches for each individual task, the investigation of the interaction between these tasks still primarily relies on designers' experience and ingenuity. It is thus the goal of this research to develop formal models and algorithms to investigate such interaction systematically. This dissertation presents a two-phase co-synthesis approach to the problem. In the architectural level, given a set of application benchmarks and a pipeline structure, the ASIA (Automatic Synthesis of Instruction set Architecture) design automation system generates an instruction set and allocates hardware resources which best fit the applications, and, at the same time, maps the applications to assembly code with the synthesized instruction set. This approach formulates the codesign problem as a modified scheduling/allocat..