A rapid prototyping environment for designing and simulating multilevel computer architectures

This paper describes a software environment that allows the rapid development and simulation of computer architectures. The system, called the Architecture Prototyping Environment (APE), is based on an object-oriented approach for hardware component description. This approach allows the formation of a class definition that does not require the writing of special-purpose simulators. In this way, computer architecture hardware components are effectively and conveniently expressed as a class library, representing basic elements of the processor. APE allows the user to define the computer architecture at the instruction set level and then to switch automatically to the lower level of the corresponding microarchitecture. APE supports the design of a computer architecture (definition phase), which is used as a starting point for the next phase for evaluating prototype behavior (test phase). APE accepts modifications of the architecture design and repeats the simulation process until architectural features match user requirements.