LISA captures the information required to generate software tools (compiler, assembler, instruction set simulator, ...) and implementation hardware (in VHDL or Verilog) of a given processor.
LISA has been used to re-implement the hardware of existing processor cores, keeping the binary compatibility with the legacy version, as all software tools did already exist and legacy compiled software images could be executed on the newly created hardware.
LISA' is not focused on the modeling of other on-chip components around the processor core itself, such as peripherals, hardware accelerators, buses and memories; Other languages such as SystemC can be used for these.
The language is still in evolution to cover research on processors, including Reconfigurable computing (in LISA 3.0), multi-core, parallel programming.
One noticeable branch called LISA+ has been created for handling the modeling of peripherals such as interrupt controllers, timers, etc.