Electronic Circuit Simulation Software Efficiency of Algorithm: It's a complex task to estimate the various architectural parameters of a given theoretical algorithm. The automatic code modification and analysis technology explained here can help.

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by Sergey N. Zheltov, project manager, and Stanislav V. Bratanov, software engineer, Microprocessor Research, Intel Labs. Intel Corp.

This paper gives an overview of an automatic code modification and analysis technology designed to assist in architectural research.

Designing new processor architectures is a very time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive task. First, preliminary research is required to form a general concept of a new architecture long before simulators or pre-production samples are ready. Then, initial design concepts resulting from the preliminary research must be proved before making any decisions about what to simulate.

This underscores the importance of estimating essential characteristics when designing an architecture—before beginning the real work on simulation.

In addition, many architectural concepts may be determined by a particular problem to be solved, and the goal of a new architecture may be formulated in terms of making existing software or theoretical algorithms applicable to real-time computation.

To assist in solving the complex task of estimating various architectural parameters related to a particular algorithm, the technology of automatic code modification and analysis (Code Processor) was developed.

Further in this paper the technology is described in detail, with linked code samples, and illustrated by an example of a high-definition video encoder.

Suggested Solution
The need to analyze separate applications dictated the general idea of the solution—the simulating system must isolate an application of interest from the rest of the system. That is why we decided to work with the source code of the application and try to intercept all cases where the application being analyzed referenced a resource being simulated.

The above considerations were implemented as a set of tools including an assembly language analyzer, several simulator modules, and corresponding instrumentation modules.