NISC Modeling and Compilation

Running an application on a general purpose processor is not very efficient and implementing the whole application in hardware is not always possible. The best option is to run the application on a customized datapath that is designed based on the characteristics of the application. The instruction set interface in normal processors limits the possible customization of the datapath. In NISC, the instruction interface is removed and the datapath is directly controlled. Therefore, any customization in the datapath can be easily utilized by the supporting tools such as compiler and simulator and one set of such tools is enough to handle all kinds of datapaths. To achieve this goal, a generic model is needed to capture the datapath information that these tools require. In this report we present one such model and show how it can be used for simulation and compilation. We also explain the structure of a NISC compiler and show some preliminary experiments on multiple NISC architecture and their comparison with MIPS architecture.