FlexWare : A Flexible Firmware Development Environment for Embedded Systems

Abstract

The Flexware system is a software/firmware development environment for application specific instruction set processors (ASIPs) and commercial processors. It is currently composed of two main tools :

• 1. An instruction set simulator, INSULIN, which provides a cycle true VHDL based simulation environment for a user defined instruction set. The use of INSULIN has allowed to model in-house (two DSPs and one microcontrol ASIP) and commercial processors (e.g. the Intel 80C196 and SGS-Thomson ST7291 microcontrollers, as well as the SGS-Thomson ST18950 DSP) in a fraction of the time required for a manually developed model. Execution times are in the order of thousands of instructions per second on a Sparc 2.

• 2. A retargetable code generator, CODESYN, which takes one or more algorithms expressed in a high-level language and maps them onto a user defined instruction set to produce optimized machine code for a target ASIP or a commercial processor core. The development of a CODESYN based compiler for a DSP ASIP produced results within 20% of hand coded assembler.