Automatic Design and Implementation of Microprocessors

This paper reports recent work on the automatic design and implementation of microprocessors to suit particular applications. We use our own hardware compilation system to produce synchronous hardware implementations of parallel programs and have constructed platforms incorporating Field Programmable Gate Array and transputer components to host such implementations. Our chosen language, Handel, is essentially a subset of occam with as few extensions as necessary to address the special nature of hardware implementations. The system reported here can take a Handel program and, rather than mapping it directly to hardware, will rst transform it into a custom microprocessor , expressed as another Handel program, together with a machine code program. The hardware compiler is then invoked to construct the resulting application-speciic microprocessor. This approach may have beneets for applications where the kernel, orìnner loop', is too complex to be implemented as parallel hardware, but where a speed increase beyond that possible with oo-the-shelf microprocessors is desired.