隨著資訊家電,及一些掌上型設備的快速發展, 嵌入式系統越形重要, 其數量及種類亦快數發展。在嵌入式系統上發展應用程式跟在一般個人電腦是發展應用程式是差不多的, 我們一樣需要一個好的開發環境,包括編譯器,組譯器,還有在缺少硬體的輔助下,需要模擬器來驗證程式的正確性以及得到程式執行的效能分析。
我們可以使用GNU C來當作嵌入式系統的交叉編譯器(cross-compiler), 它是免費的而且功能強大, 但對於一個開發環境, 仍是缺少模擬器。在這篇論文中,我們學習ARM處理器的模擬器的發展。 之所以選擇ARM處理器是因為很多廠商使用ARM處理器當作他們的控制器, 而且ARM處理器成本低, 耗電少,性能高, 相信未來會更受歡迎。

我們先介紹ARM處理器的組織架構,指令集。 另外還有一些其他的ARM處理器的模擬器, 包括一些商業版。另外,將介紹我們的ARM7模擬器,它是以SWARM 0.2做基礎的。最後是執行一些benchmark程式所得到的結果分析以及結論。

With the vast development of information appliances, embedded systems are becoming more and more important. Development of embedded systems often require a good development environment, which often includes a compiler and a simulator or emulator. In this thesis, we study the development of an emulator for the ARM processor. The ARM processor was chosen because it is very popular in embedded systems. We will examine the organization, instruction set, and other emulators of ARM. We then describe our emulator for the ARM7 processor, which is based on the SWARM 0.2[4] emulator. Some performance data of ARM7 obtained from our emulator are reported.

[1] ARM Ltd.
http://www.arm.com/
[2] The Intel® StrongARM* microprocessor family.
http://developer.intel.com/design/strong/
[3] Rich Witek and James Montanaro. “StrongARM: A high-Performance ARM
Processor”. IEEE Proceedings of COMPCON 1996.
[4] http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~michael/phd/swarm.html
[5] http://www.arm.com/products/DevKit/
[6] Doug Burger and Todd M. Austin. “Evaluating Future Microprocessors: The SimpleScalar Tool Set”. Technical Report 96-1308, July 1996.
[7] http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/amulet/index.html
[8] Charles Price. “MIPS IV Instruction Set, revision 3.1”. MIPS Technologies, Inc., Mountain View, CA, January 1995.
[9] Jian Huang. “The Simulator for Multi-threaded Computer Architecture.”
[10] James R. Larus. “SPIM R20: A MIPS R2000 simulator”.
[11] http://www.acorn.co.uk/
[12] Cosimo Antonio Prete, “The ChARM Tool for Tuning Embedded Systems”, IEEE 1997
[13] http://wwwus.semiconductors.philips.com/technology/embedded/jumpstartxe/