In recent years the device density in integrated circuits has become so great that entire systems are being fabricated on a single chip. Market demands and lower manufacturing costs force the design of these single chip system implementations to be completed in shorter times leading to a productivity gap between device density and system design times. This productivity gap is causing system designers to approach the design process in innovative ways. Behavioural synthesis, hardware-software design partitioning, IP block licensing, and application specific processors show promise in the drive to alleviate this productivity gap. The use of application specific processors licensed from third-party sources limit the ability of the system designer to specify the intricate details of the processor, while designing an application specific processor in-house is time-consuming. This thesis describes the development of a language and set of tools that enable the automatic generation of application specific processors. The language OPAL, or O&barbelow;bject-oriented P&barbelow;rocessor A&barbelow;rchitecture L&barbelow;anguage, allows a processor architect to describe the processor's functional needs without requiring the designer to specify implementation specific details such as the data path and control logic. The OPAL toolset automatically generates a Hardware Description Language (HDL) description of the application specific processor. A processor specific assembler is automatically generated allowing the processor user to write assembly level code for the application specific processor. In addition, a processor emulator is generated allowing the processor designer to execute assembly level code on a PC to verify functional correctness of the processor and assembly code. Examples of the OPAL language and tools are provided in the thesis.
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