A Formalization of an Emulation Based Co-designed Virtual Machine

Co-designed Virtual Machine (Co-VM) technique combining software and hardware enables a different approach to microprocessor design, where the host architecture is designed concurrently with the software that runs on it. The key of a Co-VM is to emulate the source architecture on the target architecture through interpretation and binary translation. There is some commonness of different Co-VMs. In this paper, we propose a formalization of the emulation based co-designed virtual machine. Some theorem, lemma and properties are put forward, like the VM should take the binary translation strategy based on the semantics of a basic code block or a super block rather than the strategy based on instruction. The solutions proposed in this paper can be used as a guide for choosing the interpretation or binary translation strategy when designing a Co-VM.