Abstract
The design evaluation of embedded processors at each level is an important issue, the architecture level especially. The accurate evaluation at the architecture level is the key to improving the system performance, but it is not easy to fix the complete design at the architecture level. The designers need to spend a lot of time in exploring different architectures based on the applications. Without an appropriate simulation tool for performance evaluation, exploring different processor architectures would be painful, if possible. An instruction set architecture simulator is a simulation tool which attempts to simplify this work. In this thesis, we propose an instruction-accurate and cycle-accurate instruction set architecture simulator for embedded processor design. It helps us easily and quickly describing different embedded processors, using a simple architecture description method which we developed. According to the simulation results, it is easy for us choose the highest performance architecture with an acceptable area overhead. A debugging environment also is provided for debugging, which is important for application software development. It allows easy modification of the source code. If there are some special opcodes which our simulator does not support, one can revise the source code with the proposed environment. In our experiment, we simulated and evaluated the performance of some processor architectures. Based on the results, we were able to modify the architectures to improve their performance. The performance improvement varies from 19% to 42% in these cases.