Retargetable assembly code generation by bootstrapping

In a hardware/software codesign environment compilers are needed that map software components of a partitioned system behavioral description onto a programmable processor. Since the processor structure is not static, but can repeatedly change during the design process, the compiler should be retargetable in order to avoid manual compiler adaption for each alternative architecture. A restriction of existing retargetable compilers is that they only generate microcode for the target architecture instead of machine-level code. We introduce a bootstrapping technique permitting to translate high-level language (HLL) programs into real machine-level code using a retargetable microcode compiler. Retargetability is preserved, permitting to compare different architectural alternatives in a codesign framework within relatively short time