Siroyan multiprocessor to get CoSy compiler treatment

Siroyan multiprocessor to get CoSy compiler treatment
By Peter Clarke, EE Times
January 26, 2001 (9:13 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010123S0088

LONDON — Siroyan Ltd. will use the the CoSy compiler development tool from ACE Associated Compiler Experts bv (Amsterdam, Denmark) to develop C-language and object-oriented compilers for its Opus multiprocessor architecture. Rubicon, the first implementation, is currently under development.

Siroyan (Reading, England) is designing what it claims will be a scalable multiprocessing architecture that can include RISC and DSP processing nodes in a so-called clustered very long instruction word (VLIW) architecture. The number of processing units will be one of the configuration options within Rubicon, which itself will be one implementation of the more generalized Opus architecture.

Founded in June 1999, Siroyan expects to complete the first compilers for Rubicon in the fourth quarter, at which time it also expects to announce further details of the Opus/Rubicon architecture.

The architecture is one of m any in development that aim to combine the virtues of RISC, DSP and VLIW in a single form. Opus is expected to compute billions of elementary operations per second and to be suitable for communications and consumer-oriented applications including third-generation mobile and Internet connectivity, digital TV and digital video broadcasting.

ACE has been developing the CoSy compilation system for many years and has applied it to a range of processors from 4-bit DSPs to 256-bit VLIW processors. CoSy is a commercial development system that allows engineers to generate compilers for a range of languages and targets.

"The advantage of CoSy is that it is very modular, and this makes it possible to transfer a lot of compiler knowledge from us to the processor engineers," said Marco Roodzant, vice president of marketing and sales at ACE. "Industrial CoSy users have generated compilers for more than 25 embedded architectures."

ACE is also leading a European collaborative re search project to develop a Java front end to CoSy.

"It's a key factor in our approach to deliver to our customers a professional-quality tool chain comprising compilers, simulation tools and debuggers that are customized to address the target configuration," said Adrian Wise, Siroyan's technical director.

Siroyan will use CoSy to develop a C-language compiler initially, and then extend this to support object orientation in the form of C++, said Ray Livesley, applications and tools development manager at Siroyan.

"We have no plans for Java, but we will be customer-driven on this. In embedded applications, although people may want to run a Java virtual machine, they don't necessarily want to develop in Java."

Livesley said that although Rubicon implementations of the Opus architecture would have varying resources and run certain application-specific instructions, it would be possible to create a single compiler able to handle the different multiprocessor resources available on each Opus/Rubico n implementation.

"Our intention is to have a single compiler that supports the RISC and VLIW computation. The compiler will do the scheduling," he said.

Livesley said this would be possible through the use of a configuration file and because Siroyan would control the different version of Rubicon. "We won't give customers complete freedom to specify the architecture," he said.