A development environment for horizontal microcode

A development environment for horizontal microcode is described that uses percolation scheduling-a transformational system for parallelism extraction-and an interactive profiling system to give the user control over the microcode compaction process while reducing the burdensome details of architecture, correctness preservation, and synchronization. Through a graphical interface, the user suggests what can be executed in parallel, while the system performs the actual changes using semantics-preserving transformations. If a request cannot be satisfied, the system reports the problem causing the failure. The user can then help eliminate the problem by supplying guidance or information not explicit in the code.>