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F. Brandner, D. Ebner, A. Krall:
"Compiler Generation from Structural Architecture Descriptions";
Talk: International Conference on Compilers, Architecture, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems, Salzburg; 2007-09-30 - 2007-10-03; in: "Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Compilers, Architecture, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems", A. Donlin (ed.); ACM, (2007), ISBN: 978-1-59593-826-8; 13 - 22.

With increasing complexity of modern embedded systems, the availability of highly optimizing compilers becomes more and more important. At the same time, application specific instruction-set processors (ASIPs) are used to fine-tune hardware platforms to the intended application, demanding the availability of retargetable components throughout thewhole tool chain.

A very promising approach is to model the target architecture using a dedicated description language that is rich enough to generate hardware components and the required tool chain, e.g., assembler, linker, simulator, and compiler.

In this work we present a new structural architecture description language (ADL) that is used to derive the architecture dependent components of a compiler backend - most notably an instruction selector based on tree pattern matching. We combine our backend with gcc, thereby opening up the way for a large number of readily available high level optimizations. Experimental results show that the automatically derived code generator is competitive in comparison to a handcrafted compiler backend.

ADL, architecture description, retargetable compiler

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1289881.1289886

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/pub-inf_4852.pdf