System-level specification of instruction sets

System-level design requires some sort of specification for a system at the level of abstraction of the system. When the system (or sub-system) is a processor, the appropriate level of abstraction is the instruction set. However, there are no good approaches for describing processors at this level. Nevertheless, this type of specification has a number of benefits: it is more concise (and thus less error-prone) than more general alternatives; it can be re-used in later re-implementations; and it provides support for software codesign through compiler-generators (which rely on higher-level abstractions than other techniques provide). Therefore, we have developed a methodology and an embodying language for specifying processors at the instruction set level.<<ETX>>