A cycle-accurate ISS for a dynamically reconfigurable processor architecture

Reconfigurable processor architectures (RAs) have been proving as an effective way to couple significant performance improvements with severe energy constraints, such as those imposed by modern portable real-time applications. XiRisc is a VLIW RISC processor architecture featuring a reconfigurable dataflow-oriented functional unit, the so-called PiCoGA, allowing run-time dynamic extension of the instruction set. In this paper, we propose a LISA-based instruction set simulator (ISS) for the reconfigurable processor, retargetable through a dynamically linked library that emulates instruction set extension. The ISS comprises a SystemC system-level model with embedded bus architecture and memory hierarchy (on-chip and off-chip) to provide a reconfigurable system-on-chip performance evaluator.