Simulation to ARM Processors Based on the Instruction's Eigenvalue

The ARM simulator not only eliminates the barriers of embedded systems' hardware environment, but also improves the efficiency, security and reliability for the development process. To improve the performance of an ARM-based function simulation, a novel simulation framework to the ARM processor is proposed, which is based on the ARM instructions' eigenvalue. Therein, functions of registers, the instruction set and the pipeline of the ARM processor are first simulated. Then the key issues, such as computation of the status bits and decoding of the instructions, are deeply studied, which tries to improve the interpretive speed for the simulation. Specially a status calculating algorithm and an instruction matching algorithm based on the eigenvalues are designed. Through theoretical analysis and physical experiments with the simulation in S3C2440, the correctness and efficiency of the simulator are verified.

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