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A major topic in the field of firmware engineering concerns the development of tools to assist the process of firmware development. At the microarchitecture level, there are significant differences between computer systems even from the same manufacturer. Tools and techniques used to construct firmware for one target microarchitecture are often unsuited for use on another target microarchitecture. Skills and software are not portable among the variety of microarchitectures available. In an effort to address these problems, retargetable tools have been proposed in the literature. This research project examines the problem of constructing firmware engineering tools from a description of the target microarchitecture. The problems of describing a microarchitecture in sufficient detail to enable the automated generation of tools are addressed by the development of a microarchitecture description language suited to such automated generation.
The ARCHIMEDES system is a prototype Portable Retargetable Integrated Firmware Development Environment. The ARCHIMEDES system consists of the ARCHI microarchitecture description language and the MEDES debugging simulator. The ARCHI language may be used to retarget a wide variety of firmware engineering tools for synchronous microarchitectures. The MEDES debugging simulator was developed to demonstrate the descriptive power of the ARCHI language.
Two microprogrammable computers are described by the ARCHI language. A simulator is generated for each microarchitecture, and a test microprogram is executed on each machine.