Instruction set compiled simulation: a technique for fast and flexible instruction set simulation - Design Automation Conference, 2003. Proceedings

Instruction set simulators are critical tools for the exploration and validation of new programmable architectures. Due to increasing complexity of the architectures and timeto-market pressure, performance is the most important feature of an instruction-set simulator. Interpretive simulators are flexible but slow, whereas compiled simulators deliver speed at the cost of flexibility. This paper presents a novel technique for generation of fast instruction-set simulators that combines the benefit of both compiled and interpretive simulation. We achieve fast instruction accurate simulation through two mechanisms. First, we move the timeconsuming decoding process from run-time to compile time while maintaining the flexibility of the interpretive simulation. Second, we use a novel anstructzon abstractaon technique to generate aggressively optimized decoded instructions that further improves simulation performance. Our anstructaon set compzled szmulataon (IS-CS) technique delivers upto 40% performance improvement over the best known published result that has the flexibility of interpretive simulation. We illustrate the applicability of the IS-CS technique using the ARM7 embedded processor.