Binary Instruction Format Specification for NoGap

Abstract: Nowadays, hardware designers want to get a powerful and friendly tool to speedup the design flow and design quality. The new development suit NoGap is pro-posed to meet those requirements. NoGap is a design automation tool for ASIP,it helps users to focus on the design stage, free them from module connection andsignal assignment, or integration. Different from the normal ADL tools which limitusers’ design ideas to some template frameworks, NoGap allow designers to im-plement what they want with NoGap Common Language (NoGapCL). However,NoGap is still not perfect, some important functionalities are lacking, but withthe flexible generator component structure, NoGap and NoGapCL can easily beextended.This thesis will firstly investigate the structure of Novel Generator of Acceler-ators and Processors (NoGap) from software prospective view, and then present anew NoGap generator, OpCode Assignment Generator (OpAssignGen), which al-lows users to assign operation code values, exclude operation codes and customizethe operation code size or instruction size.A simple example based on the Microprocessor without Interlocked PipelineStages (MIPS) instructions sets will be mentioned to give users a brief view ofhow to use OpAssignGen. After that, the implementation of the new generatorwill be explained in detail.What’s more, some of NoGap’s flaws will be exposed, but more suggestionsand improvements for NoGap will be given.At last, a successful synthesis result based on the simple MIPS hardware im-plementation will be shown to prove the new generator is well implemented. Moreresults and the final conclusion will be given at the end of the thesis.