Generating production quality software development tools using a machine description language

This paper presents a methodology to automatically generate production quality software development tools for programmable architectures using the machine description language LISA. Various architectures presenting diverse architectural originalities will be presented and the feasibility of automatically generating simulator, assembler, linker and graphical debugger frontend are discussed. The presented approach is not limited to a fixed abstraction level-case studies of the Texas Instruments C62x and C54x, the Analog Devices ADSP2101 as well as the ARM7 show the applicability of the methodology from cycle/phase to instruction accurate models.