Automated generation of efficient instruction decoders for Instruction Set Simulators

Fast Instruction Set Simulators (ISS) are a critical part of MPSoC design flows. The complexity of developing these ISS combined with the ability to extend instruction sets tend to make automated generation of ISS a need. One important part of every ISS is its instruction decoder, but as the encoding of instruction sets becomes less orthogonal because of the incremental addition of instructions, the generation of a decoder is not anymore an obvious task. In this paper, we present two automated decoder generation strategies that are able to handle non-orthogonal instruction encodings. The first one builds a decision tree that does not consider the instruction´s occurrences while the second considers these frequencies. In both cases, we use binary decision diagrams to represent the instructions encodings and the complex conditions due to the non-orthogonality of the encodings in order to generate the decoders. Our experiments on the MIPS and ARM (including VFP and Neon extensions) instruction sets show that both algorithms produce efficient decoders, and that it is beneficial to consider instruction frequencies.