Re: C compiler supporting arbitrary bit width integral datatypes?

On Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:31:05 +0100, BjC6rn Franke wrote:


> Have you already been looking at CoWare Processor Designer[1], it may
> give you a flexible compiler construction toolkit, simulator generator
> and C-to-HDL design flow for your ASIP. As it seems that you're a
> student or working for a University you may be able to purchase a
> license at a very reasonable price via EuroPractice[2].


Or use the language behind the CoWare tools, SystemC, which has a free
and open source reference implementation (www.systemc.org). It's a
template library for C++ aimed at hardware modeling. Standardized as
IEEE 1666, which unusually for the IEEE can be downloaded free.


Be warned the reference implementation has terrible performance for
anything over 64-bits wide. The discrete event simulation kernel also
can be a significant overhead, but that's the price you pay for
convenient functionality.


Unfortunately this reference implementation is the basis of all the
commercial tools as well, and I do not know of any high performance
implementation (there are many claims, but none independently
verified).


CoWare's tools are good, and they have other tools aimed at ASICs in
general. There are plenty of others out there as well. Generally they
add a graphical development environment (Eclipse based in many cases,
including CoWare) and libraries of pre-packaged IP models (bus
protocols, common peripherals, transactors). However the underlying
functionality of SystemC may be sufficient for your purposes.


HTH,




Jeremy


>
>
> ihusar@fit.vutbr.cz wrote:
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> I am working on a project, where we are trying to make a development
>> environment for new ASIP processor design. This project, among other
>> parts, contains compiler and simulator generator. For these two parts,
>> I would need some C compiler, that supports arbitrary bit-width
>> integers.
>>
>> For the simulator, we need to generate code that simulates registers of
>> arbitrary bit width and for compiler generator, we would need to
>> optimize C code that describes instruction's behavior to extract
>> instruction selectrion rule for each instruction,
>>
>> Have you heard or read about such compiler? (any references would be
>> useful)
>>
>> P.S.: So far, I have found Valen-C project (quite old, not made it work
>> yet), then I tried the clang frontend (it seems that to implement
>> support would be quite problematic but not impossible) and also I am
>> going to try some synthetizers that generate HW from C code.

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