Abstract
The XCore microprocessor is an embedded device developed by XMOS Ltd. of Bristol, UK. The Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) contains a range of typical instructions, for example, for control flow, register-to-register calculation and memory access, but also provides support for efficient multi-threaded programming, parallelism and communication with other devices via fast interconnects. Support for these features is integrated into the ISA of the XCore. This greatly improves run-time performance, at the cost of introducing specialist instructions to the ISA, which comprises 170 instructions. The ISA contains instructions of both two and four byte length, and implements a very compact encoding scheme. The XCore is general-purpose and has been exploited in a range of different markets, including audio, display, communications, robotics and motor control. As part of a Knowledge Transfer Secondment (Grant EP/H500316/1) at the University of Bristol, a formal model of the complete ISA was constructed in Event-B notation, using the Rodin toolset. This project applied the Event-B and Rodin-based techniques for ISA analysis, developed at the University of Bristol, and extended them to an industrial setting.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bendisposto, J., Fritz, F., Jastram, M., Leuschel, M., Weigelt, I.: Developing Camille: A text editor for Rodin. Softw. Pract. Exp. 41(2), 189–198 (2011)
Bergeron, J.: Writing Testbenches: Functional Verification of HDL Models, 2nd edn. Kluwer Academic, Norwell (2003)
Chockler, H., Halpern, J.Y., Kupferman, O.: What causes a system to satisfy a specification? ACM Trans. Comput. Log. 9, 20:1–20:26 (2008)
Foster, H.D., Krolnik, A.C., Lacey, D.J.: Assertion-Based Design. Springer, Berlin (2003)
Hennessy, J., Patterson, D.: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo (2003)
May, D.: XMOS XS1 Architecture. XMOS Ltd. (2008)
Roder, J.: Relevance filters for Event-B. ETH Zurich (2010)
Watt, D.: Programming XC on XMOS Devices. XMOS Ltd. (2009)
Wright, S., Eder, K.: Using Event-B to construct instruction set architectures. Form. Asp. Comput. 23(1), 73–89 (2010)
Wright, S.: Automatic generation of C from Event-B. In: Workshop on Integration of Model-based Formal Methods and Tools (2009)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wright, S., Eder, K. (2013). Experience of Deploying Event-B in Industrial Microprocessor Development. In: Romanovsky, A., Thomas, M. (eds) Industrial Deployment of System Engineering Methods. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33170-1_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33170-1_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33169-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33170-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)