Synthesis of Instruction Sets for Pipelined Microprocessors

We present a systematic approach to synthesize an instruction set such that the given application software can be efficiently mapped to a parameterized, pipelined microarchitecture. In addition, the assembly code is generated to show how the application can be compiled with the synthesized instruction set. The design of instruction sets is formulated as a modified scheduling problem. A binary tuple is proposed to model the semantics of instructions and integrate the instruction formation process into the scheduling process. A simulated annealing scheme is used to solve for the schedules. Experiments have shown that the approach is capable of synthesizing powerful instructions for modern pipelined microprocessors. The synthesis algorithm ran with reasonable time and a modest amount of memory for large benchmarks.