CodAL, standing for Codasip Architectural Language, is central to developing a processor core using Codasip Studio. The language has a C-like syntax and it merges good practices and code constructs from conventional programming languages and hardware description languages. It has been developed from the outset to describe all aspects of a processor including both the instruction set architecture (ISA) and microarchitecture.
Each processor description includes four elements in its description:
- Architectural resources, for example, registers and a program counter.
- Instruction set, that is, names of instructions, their operands and their binary form (opcodes).
- Semantics, or a description of the behaviour of each instruction and exception – how they affect the architectural resources.
- Implementation, which includes those resources and behaviour (especially timing) that are not visible in the architectural model but which define a particular micro-architectural implementation. Note that more than one micro-architectural implementation can be in a single CodAL description.
The architectural or instruction accurate (IA) model contains the instruction set, architectural resources, and the semantics. The micro-architectural or cycle accurate (CA) model contains the instruction set, architectural resources and the micro-architectural implementation.
CodAL description is object-oriented, meaning that an object can be instantiated into a more complex object, the complex object into an even more complex one, etc. CodAL allows information to be passed through the object hierarchy without having to use complex function calls.
The CodAL element is a common example of an object, and in the following example we show an element describing a multiply-accumulate instruction.
The use statement describes the resources that are used by the instruction – a destination register (dst) and two source registers (src1, src2). Next, the assembly statement describes the assembler mnemonic (mac) and its arguments. The binary statement describes the binary representation of the instruction and arguments. Finally, the semantics statement describes the multiply-accumulate operation.
The CodAL description is used by the Codasip Studio toolset to generate an SDK and an HDK. For example, the element description would be used when generating the instruction set simulator (ISS), assembler, disassembler, C/C++ compiler, and debugger for the processor core.
The CA description would take advantage of the instruction set and resources descriptions used for the IA models. In addition, the CA description would specify microarchitectural features such as the pipeline length.
The cycle-accurate parts of the CodAL description would be used for generating the cycle-accurate simulator, RTL, testbench, and UVM environment. In this way CodAL is the single source for all aspects of the processor hardware and software. In contrast, some other processor development tools require two languages to describe the processor core. The methodology also enables powerful verification of generated RTL against a golden reference model in generated UVM environment.
