Cycle accurate simulator generator for NoGap

Application Specific Instruction-set Processors (ASIPs) are needed to handle the future demand of flexible yet high performance computation in mobile devices. However designing an ASIP is complicated by the fact that not only the processor but, also tools such as assemblers, simulators, and compilers have to be designed. Novel Generator of Accelerators And Processors (NoGap), is a design automation tool for ASIP design that imposes very few limitations on the designer. Yet NoGap supports the designer by automating much of the tedious and error prone tasks associated with ASIP design. This paper will present the techniques used to generate a stand alone software simulator for a processor designed with NoGap. The focus will be on the core algorithms used. Two main problems had to be solved, simulation of a data path graph and simulation of leaf functional units. The concept of sequentialization is introduced and the algorithms used to perform both the leaf unit sequentialization and data path sequentialization is presented. A key component of the sequentialization process is the Micro Architecture Generation Essentials (Mage) dependency graph. The mage dependency graph and the algorithm used for its generation are also presented in this paper. A NoGap simulator was generated for a simple processor and the results were verified.