ViCE-UPSLA: A visual high level language for accurate simulation of interlocked pipelined processors

Abstract

Simulation of processors is needed in early stages of development to reduce cost and increase quality of processor designs. Suitable simulators can be generated automatically from high-level specifications of the processor architecture. For this purpose, we have developed the domain specific visual language ViCE-UPSLA. It allows to describe pipeline based register-register, register-memory processor architectures and generates efficient simulators for such processors. In this way a variety of processors can be quickly prototyped for validation and evaluation. We have successfully used ViCE-UPSLA to model and simulate a processor with an ARM [ARM00] like architecture.