System and method for generating a configurable processor supporting a user-defined plurality of instruction sizes

摘要

A processor generation system includes the ability to describe processors with three instruction sizes. In one example implementation, instructions can be 16-, 24- and 64-bits. This enables a new range of architectures that can exploit parallelism in architectures. In particular, this enables the generation of VLIW architectures. According to another aspect, the processor generator allows a designer to add a configurable number of load/store units to the processor. In order to accommodate multiple load/store units, local memories connected to the processor can have multiple read and write ports (one for each load/store unit). This further allows the local memories to be connected in any arbitrary connection topology. Connection box hardware is automatically generated that provides an interface between the load/store units and the local memories based on the configuration.