[LLVMdev] Announcing the Open Source Release of TTA-Based Codesign Environment (TCE) 1.0

[Pekka Jääskeläinen]

TTA-Based Codesign Environment (TCE) is a toolset for designing
application-specific processors (ASP) based on the Transport Triggered
Architecture (TTA). TTA is a minimalistic processor architecture
template that allows high level of control for the designer to choose
the boundary between the hardware and the software.

The toolset provides a complete codesign flow from C programs down to
synthesizable VHDL and parallel program binaries. Processor
customization points include the register files, function units,
supported operations, and the interconnection network.

TCE has been developed internally in the Department of Computer Systems
of Tampere University of Technology since the early 2003.
Now the first open source release, labeled TCE v1.0 has been released to
public and licensed under the MIT license.

Feature highlights:
-------------------

Compiler:

* LLVM 2.5 based
* Custom operation support
* Runtime retargetable backend: no recompilation of the whole toolchain
   needed during architecture/operation set exploration
* Basic block scope instruction scheduler
* Delay slot filling
* Software bypassing
* Parallel TTA assembler
* Software and hardware floating point support

Architecture simulator:

* Graphical and command line user interfaces
* Interpretive debugging engine for cycle stepping
* Static compiled engine for fast simulation with basic block
   granularity (but instruction cycle count accuracy)
* Dynamic compiled engine for improved startup time with fast simulation

Processor and Program Image Generation:

* Support for generating implementation for the designed processor
   as VHDL
* Generates a bit image of the program with support for dictionary-based
   instruction compression

Integrated Development Environment tools:

* Graphical user interface (GUI) for editing architecture resources
* GUI for editing operation set definitions

Links:
------

* TCE:
   http://tce.cs.tut.fi
* TTA wikipedia article:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_triggered_architecture
* The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure:
   http://llvm.org

Best regards,
-- 
Pekka Jääskeläinen,
Researcher
Department of Computer Systems
Tampere University of Technology
Finland