Vienna Architecture Description Language

The Vienna Architecture Description Language (VADL) is a powerful processor description language (PDL) that enables the concise formal specification of processor architectures. By utilizing a single VADL processor specification, the VADL system exhibits the capability to automatically generate a range of artifacts necessary for rapid design space exploration. These include assemblers, compilers, linkers, functional instruction set simulators, cycle-accurate instruction set simulators, synthesizable specifications in a hardware description language, as well as test cases and documentation.

One distinctive feature of VADL lies in its separation of the instruction set architecture (ISA) specification and the microarchitecture (MiA) specification. This segregation allows users the flexibility to combine various ISAs with different MiAs, providing a versatile approach to processor design. In contrast to existing PDLs, VADL's MiA specification operates at a higher level of abstraction, enhancing the clarity and simplicity of the design process. Notably, with a single ISA specification, VADL streamlines compiler generation and maintenance by eliminating the need for intricate compiler-specific knowledge.

OpenVADL, a complete new implementation of VADL is under development and will become open source. Compared to the initial closed source implementation it extends the language with additional features. The new parser and some of the language extensions are described in the bachelor thesis of Michael Nestler.

This web page collects different resources regarding VADL.