Rapid development of application specific microcontrollers with the ASM environment

A new and innovative CAD system for generation of application specific microcontrollers (ASM) has been used to develop a novel core architecture for embedded systems incorporating an effective task switch mechanism and HLL programming support. The ASM environment is based on a properly defined architecture model and consists of a set of tools for instruction set description, HW-SW-cosimulation of the processor and the application software, datapath and controlpath synthesis, and datapath animation. The CAD system, the architecture and it's first silicon implementation, code-named T2, are presented.