Abstract
This paper presents an interesting approach to retargeting existing software at the assembly (or binary) level from one instruction set to another instruction set. The approach is based on abstracting the instruction set behaviors as symbolic transitions of the machine states. The retargeting process is modeled as a planning process, an AI technique, that finds a plan (a sequence of operations) which brings the target processor from the same initial state to the same final state as the original software does on the source processor. The approach has been successfully applied in a design project of an x86 compatible microprocessor with an embedded internal RISC core for efficient execution. The proposed approach produced optimal x86-to-RISC mapping. In addition, the approach made it easy to keep up with microarchitecture revision during the design exploration phase since the mapping table can be automatically re-generated and re-evaluated promptly, which is difficult to achieve manually.
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Huang, IJ., Kao, WF. A Machine State Transition Approach to Instruction Retargeting for Embedded Microprocessors. Design Automation for Embedded Systems 5, 153–177 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008926807523
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008926807523